The translator’s wife’s traces : Alma Cardell Curtin and Jeremiah Curtin

Jeremiah Curtin translated most works by Poland’s first literary Nobel Prize winner, Henryk Sienkiewicz. He was helped in this life-long task by his wife Alma Cardell Curtin. It was Alma who, after her husband’s death, produced the lengthy Memoirs she steadfastly ascribed to her husband for his, rather than hers, greater glory. This paper investigates the possible textual influences Alma might have had on other works by her husband, including his travelogues, ethnographic and mythological studies, and the translations themselves. Lacking traditional authorial evidence, this study relies on stylometric methods comparing most frequent word usage by means of cluster analysis of z-scores. There is much in this statistics-based authorial attribution to show how Alma Cardell Curtin affected at least two other original works of her husband and, possibly, at least two of his translations as well.

Success rates in most-frequent-word-based authorship attribution : a case study of 1000 Polish novels from Ignacy Krasicki to Jerzy Pilch

W artykule zbadano skuteczność atrybucji autorskiej opartej na wielowymiarowej analizie najczęstszych słów w korpusie 1000 powieści polskich napisanych między końcem XVIII i początkiem XXI wieku. Oceniono wpływ liczby autorów i/lub tekstów na uzyskane wyniki. Porównano skuteczność atrybucji w niniejszej pracy z wynikami uzyskanymi we wcześniejszych opracowaniach wykorzystujących mniejsze korpusy – a więc te, które mogły nie wykazywać regularnych prawidłowości pod tym względem. Wykazano, że w dużych kolekcjach tekstów sprawdzają się intuicyjne przypuszczenia: 1) im więcej autorów, tym trudniej o skuteczną atrybucję; 2) przy tej samej liczbie autorów liczba tekstów nie ma wpływu na skuteczność atrybucji.The success rate of authorship attribution by multivariate analysis of most-frequent-word frequencies is studied in a 1000-novel corpus of Polish literary works from the late 18th to the early 21st century. The results are examined for possible influences of the number of authors and/or the number of texts to be attributed. Also, the success rates achieved in this study are compared to those obtained in earlier studies for smaller corpora, too small perhaps to produce regular patterns. This study shows that text sets of this size confirm the intuitive predictions as to those influences: 1) the more authors, the less successful attribution; 2) for the same number of authors, the number of texts to be attributed does not influence success rate

Stylometry in a bilingual setup

The method of stylometry by most frequent words does not allow direct comparison of original texts and their translations, i.e. across languages. For instance, in a bilingual Czech-German text collection containing parallel texts (originals and translations in both directions, along with Czech and German translations from other languages), authors would not cluster across languages, since frequency word lists for any Czech texts are obviously going to be more similar to each other than to a German text, and the other way round. We have tried to come up with an interlingua that would remove the language-specific features and possibly keep the linguistically independent features of individual author signal, if they exist. We have tagged, lemmatized, and parsed each language counterpart with the corresponding language model in UDPipe, which provides a linguistic markup that is cross-lingual to a significant extent. We stripped the output of language-dependent items, but that alone did not help much. As a next step, we transformed the lemmas of both language counterparts into shared pseudolemmas based on a very crude Czech-German glossary, with a 95.6% success. We show that, for stylometric methods based on the most frequent words, we can do without translations

The stylometry of film dialogue : pros and pitfalls

We examine film dialogue with quantitative textual analysis (stylometry, sentiment analysis, distant reading). Working with transcribed dialogue in almost 300 productions, we explore the complex way in which most-frequent-words-based stylometry and lexicon-based sentiment analysis produce patterns of similarity and difference between screenwriters and/or a priori IMDB-defined genres. In fact, some of our results show that counting and comparing very frequent word lists reveals further similarities: of theme, implied audience, stylistic patternings. The results are encouraging enough to suggest that such quantitative approach to film dialogue may become a welcome addition to the arsenal of film studies methodology

Ślady żony tłumacza. Alma Cardell Curtin i Jeremiah Curtin

Traces of the Translator’s Wife. Alma Cardell Curtin and Jeremiah Curtin Jeremiah Curtin translated most works by Poland’s first literary Nobel Prize winner, Henryk Sienkiewicz. He was helped in this life-long task by his wife Alma Cardell Curtin. It was also Alma, who, after her husband’s death, produced the lengthy Memoirs she steadfastly ascribed to her husband for his, rather than hers, greater glory. This article investigates the possible textual influences Alma might have had on other works by her husband, including his travelogues, ethnographic and mythological studies, and the translations themselves. Lacking traditional authorial evidence, this study relies on stylometric methods comparing most frequent word usage by means of cluster analysis of z-scores. There is much in this statistics-based authorial attribution to show how Alma Cardell Curtin’s significantly affected at least two other original works of her husband and, possibly, at least two of his translations

Stylometria komputerowa w służbie tłumacza (na przykładzie własnych przekładów)

This paper presents a stylometric analysis of two “most literary spy novels” by John le Carre, A Perfect Spy (1986) and Absolute Friends (2003). Written 17 years apart, they were translated by the author of this paper into Polish less than months one from the other in 2003 and 2004. From the very start, it was evident for the translator that the two novels would be an interesting subject of study due to their being built according to a very similar model, especially where characterization is concerned. Both feature a slightly foolish British agent (le Carre’s famous trademark), his highly intellectual yet physically handicapped East German nemesis, the British agent’s boss/friend, etc. Since these two very similar works shared their Polish translator – who continued to experience a very strong feeling of deja vu while working on the two novels, this case seemed perfect for a study of stylistic relationships between original and translation. The main effect observed in this study was that of the three above-mentioned couples of corresponding characters, two are very expectedly similar, while one (the two East-German double agents) is not. Their similarity is “regained” in the translation – an interesting corroboration of the translator’s “intuitive” suspicion during his work on the Polish version. These results show that, at least in this – very special – case, the accuracy of studies performed by Multidimensional Scaling of correlation matrices of relative frequencies of the most frequent words is quite considerable when applied to translation. This is true despite the disquieting fact that, like previous statistical authorship attribution techniques, this correspondence lacks any compelling theoretical justification. The tentative explanations proposed so far by van Leuven-Zwart’s postulate of microstructural changes influencing the text’s macrostructure, 1995) or by McKenna, Burrows and Antonia are certainly not enough. Since overlapping semantic fields of the most frequent words of texts and divergent linguistic systems make one-on-one correspondences impossible, a more general underlying mechanism must be found. At the same time, empirical studies hinting at the existence of such a mechanism have still been very few. This is why more are needed to explain the compelling yet somewhat mysterious successes of Burrows’s “old” method.Artykuł przedstawia zastosowanie metod stylometrii komputerowej (analizy policzalnych elementów stylu) w stylistycznych badaniach porównawczych oryginału i przekładu literackiego. Wskazuje – na przykładzie własnych przekładów autora – jak pewne różnice stylistyczne w tekście oryginalnym mogą zostać zachowane lub przeciwnie – zaburzone, na podstawie świadomej lub nieświadomej decyzji tłumacza.

Translator's stylometric invisibility

In a corpus of the writings of several authors, each author being represented by several texts, it is usually enough to compare the similarities between frequencies of some 100 most frequent words (obviously, these usually include various function words rather than content words) in these texts to group the texts correctly by the authors. This paper investigates the phenomenon that translated texts also tend to be grouped by the original author rather than by the translator despite the fact that the most frequent words in a corpus of translations in no way maintain a one-to-one relationship with those in the original corpus. This is illustrated with examples of experiments performed on a variety of parallel sets of literary text in English, French and Polish

The Translator’s Wife’s traces. Alma Cardell Curtin and Jeremiah Curtin

Jeremiah Curtin translated most works by Poland’s first literary Nobel Prize winner, Henryk Sienkiewicz. He was helped in this life-long task by his wife Alma Cardell Curtin. It was Alma who, after her husband’s death, produced the lengthy Memoirs she steadfastly ascribed to her husband for his, rather than hers, greater glory. This paper investigates the possible textual influences Alma might have had on other works by her husband, including his travelogues, ethnographic and mythological studies, and the translations themselves. Lacking traditional authorial evidence, this study relies on stylometric methods comparing most frequent word usage by means of cluster analysis of z-scores. There is much in this statistics-based authorial attribution to show how Alma Cardell Curtin affected at least two other original works of her husband and, possibly, at least two of his translations as well