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Literary and Linguistic Computing Advance Access originally published online on March 24, 2005
Literary and Linguistic Computing 2006 21(1):91-103; doi:10.1093/llc/fqh051
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© The Author 2005. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of ALLC and ACH. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Burrowing into Translation: Character Idiolects in Henryk Sienkiewicz's Trilogy and its Two English Translations

Jan Rybicki

Kraków Pedagogical University, Poland

Correspondence: Jan Rybicki, Kraków Pedagogical University, Ul. Karmelicka 41, 31–128 Kraków, Poland. E-mail: jrybicki{at}ap.krakow.pl
Character idiolects in Henryk Sienkiewicz's trilogy were studied in the original and in two English translations by Jeremiah Curtin and W. S. Kuniczak. The method used was Burrows's technique of multivariate analysis of correlation matrices of relative frequencies of the most frequent words in the dialogue. The aim of the study was to verify the intuitions of traditional interpretations, to acquire a more comprehensive view of the phenomenon, and to obtain new insights into the nature of idiolect differentiation in Sienkiewicz. Multidimensional scaling plots for the original yielded patterns of idiolect differentiation by nationality, social status, gender, and age. Corresponding plots for the two translations preserved many of these patterns and exhibited strong similarities to each other. More studies including modified methods (including Burrows's Delta) are needed to observe further and explain why exactly patterns of similarity/difference between character idiolects are so strongly preserved in translation.


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