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Stylometric Methods in Comparative Text Analysis

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Literature, Language and Computing

Abstract

The article focuses on the study of the possible objectification of the procedure for comparative analysis of the original text and translation texts using computer technologies. The study draws on a lecture by Vladimir Nabokov on the novel “Madame Bovary” by Gustave Flaubert in Russian, English, French, and German. Using the T-LAB computer program, frequency dictionaries were built for the analyzed texts, which made it possible to identify ten words from the upper zone of the obtained frequency distributions that best correspond to the main themes of the novel. In addition, with the help of the T-Lab program, the associative links of the selected lexemes were analyzed. Based on the association analysis results, a number of coincidences of the joint occurrence of the analyzed lemma with other lemmas for pairs of languages were calculated. It has been established that the frequency of selected keywords demonstrates a significant match in all the languages, while in some cases there is a translation of an English word with the help of two words in the target language. However, at the level of contextual association the number of matches decreases, nowhere reaching a 100% match. Therefore, the applied method of computer stylometric analysis makes it possible to trace how the translator, creatively interpreting the meaning of the source text, forms their own associative fields to reveal the content of the author's topics.

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Acknowledgements

This research has been conducted with financial support from St. Petersburg University (project No 92565342).

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Correspondence to Alexander Grebennikov .

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Grebennikov, A., Ivanova, E., Koryshev, M., Solovieva, M. (2023). Stylometric Methods in Comparative Text Analysis. In: Eismont, P., Khokhlova, M., Koryshev, M., Riekhakaynen, E. (eds) Literature, Language and Computing. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-3604-5_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-3604-5_9

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