Corpus-assisted stylistics and translation criticism: a distributional analysis of seven Italian translations of Joseph Conrad’s The Lagoon

This paper explores how corpus-assisted distributional analysis can be used to explore the stylistic features of literary works in relation to the notion of linguistic deviation (Leech 1985: 47), that is, linguistic patterns that are motivated by aesthetic purposes (Simpson 2004: 50). This concept can also be useful when analysing translation styles and to what extent translators are aware of an author’s original choices. A stylistic analysis of Joseph Conrad’s The Lagoon and seven Italian translations are used to illustrate how distributional data can be employed for the purposes of translation criticism. Using Sketch Engine (Kilgariff et al. 2004, 2014), corpus stylistic methods were used to identify one syntactic pattern in the source text and then investigated in the target texts. The findings suggest that the translators identified the stylistic relevance of the structure to a various extent (mainly in the most recent translations from the 1990s) and employed different translation strategies to render it into Italian.