Old questions, new answers: computational stylistics in audiovisual translation research

In our paper we present a new research methodology devised for the purposes of an interdisciplinary project Film Genre and Audiovisual Translation Strategies. A Case Study in Historical Film, which combines stylometric analysis of the original and translated dialogues of historical productions with their in-depth qualitative analysis, in order to explore genre-specific strategies used by Anglophone screenwriters and Polish and Italian translators. First, we present the statistical methods used to analyze the original and translated dialogues of selected historical productions: cluster analysis of most frequent word frequencies, text length distribution and lexical density. Then, we comment on the most interesting results of our quantitative research, conducted on the parallel corpora of Anglophone, Polish and Italian dialogue lists and performed predominantly with stylo (Eder et al., 2013), a package for R, the statistical programming environment (R Core Team, 2014), later also post-processed with Gephi network analysis software (Bastian et al., 2009). Thus we wish to prove that computational stylistics can help verify preliminary assumptions concerning the presence/absence of authorial signal in the original scripts; genre and epoch signal in the English dialogues; cultural specificity of different audiovisual translation modes, as well as presence/absence of text-specific stylistic strategies, and may open up fascinating prospects for further qualitative research.