Quantitative linguistics methods in the study of the original and translation of a literary text

This article is devoted to the consideration of two variants of the translation of literary texts by Anton Chekhov into English. The purpose of the work is to investigate the original and translations of a literary text using the methods of quantitative linguistics in combination with traditional translation analysis of a literary text, and the descriptive method. The relevance of the work is due to the increasing interest of researchers in the possibilities of applied methods of computational linguistics in the study of the quantitative component of texts. Frequency lists in the original and translated texts are compiled, parts-of-speech analysis of text corpora is performed, as well as calculation of lexical diversity, and of lexical density. A comparative analysis of translations of twenty verbs of sensory perception and mental activity is carried out. The research is based on the originals of Chekhov's short stories and two versions of their translation into English, made by the British translator K. Garnett and the American translators R. Peaver and L. Volokhonskaya. The study was conducted on the basis of the NLTK libraries written in the Python programming language. The results obtained using statistical methods may differ depending on the size of the studied text corpora, as well as on the structural features of the Russian and English languages. It is concluded that the translations of R. Peaver and L. Volokhonskaya surpass the translations of K. Garnett in quantitative terms. An in-depth linguistic and translation analysis revealed that K. Garnett uses much more diverse translation techniques and strategies, which makes it possible to more accurately convey the shades of meaning of the original text into another language. The research results can be used to further develop corpus and statistical research of originals and translations of literary texts.

literary text, translation, statistical method, quantitative analysis, text corpus, A. Chekhov, lexical diversity, frequency lists, lexical density, lemma