Okay, so as you can see, there's only one of us,
and I'm certainly not Magda Heydel.
She looks much nicer than I do.
She couldn't come sadly, which actually is really a shame
because she's actually responsible for one of the texts
that I will be measuring in this presentation,
and I don't think we often have the occasion
to actually drag in the actual author
and try to extract some shocking confession,
Jerry Springer's style.
I was counting on that.
Well, sorry, you'll have to make do with just me.
The title is The Style Image of Collaborative Translation,
and we'll be focusing on a single translation
of a single novel by Virginia Woolf, Night and Day.
This is here just to, so that we can treat
whatever I'll be saying next with a grain of salt.
These are not exactly the best mottos,
the best mottos and the best quotations
from Virginia Woolf to conduct any analysis
connected with style and her works, as you can see.
But, well, this here is a cautionary statement.
So the story of the Polish translation of Night and Day,
and this is, you've just learned three Polish words,
congratulations, especially this is important.
The original was written in 1919,
and according to Magda Heydl, who,
apart from being a better translator than I am,
is also one of the leading Woolf scholars,
and she knows her Woolf.
She says, it's a good, old-fashioned,
late Victorian love story.
So this is what the original is.
The Polish translation, it's actually a shame to say,
only appeared in the year 2010.
That's the first translation.
And it was done by two translators, Anna Kowiceko,
another major Polish translator,
who, as you can see, has a very nice list of her victims.
But you can see that Magda, my good friend and colleague,
is not much worse than that.
Actually, she has recently produced
the first Polish translation of the Heart of Darkness.
You see the irony here,
that actually got the tides right in the Thames estuary.
All the others were nonsensical
from the seaman's point of view.
Anyway, so now the story is sad,
because the reason for the collaboration in this case
was that Anna Kowiceko died
somewhere during the work in 2009,
and her unfinished translation was taken over
by Magda Heydl, who translated the rest,
and edited the entire text, and this is how it was published.
And Magda Heydl said in a TV interview
that she is not sure whether she was successful
in making the book a coherent and consistent whole
from the point of view of style.
In fact, style is the only thing
that the translator actually should,
has to worry about.
Barely have I finished watching that interview on TV
when I was on the phone to Magda,
saying, Magda, don't go away.
I'm taking the electronic version of the book from you,
and we will try to see whether I can tell
where Anna Kowiceko stopped writing, and you took over.
Okay, now, speaking of collaborations,
well, of course, the authorial collaborations
are very well-known to us.
Some of them actually have been mentioned
in this conference and even today,
and David Hoover will recognize that very well, I guess.
Now, translatorier collaborations are even messier stories
because, among other things, at least on the Polish market,
most of the collaborative translations
are done by husband-wife team.
And perhaps this is why I have tried many times
and I have sent students, stood my students
at such translator teams, and they never got back
with a clear answer, what was the nature
of the collaboration?
One famous Polish translator actually said,
when his wife went out of the room,
I actually had to do the whole thing myself.
And, of course, if you ask publishers, forget it,
and translation studies, well, translation studies,
I mean, sort of, this is quite simple.
Actually, Venuti de Plors, this required invisibility
of the translator.
So, now, it's not something he likes.
It's something he sees as the general situation,
not so long ago, and, actually, the term translators
and invisibility is a classic in translation studies.
And, actually, the need for the study
of translatorial style, rather than the adequacy
of conveying the authorial style, is mentioned
by another classic of translation studies,
Mona Baker, who actually, even in this paper,
sees the need for corpus-based studies, so, yay.
But, well, we don't have many illusions here.
You can see the key phrases here, unpredictability
of the target style, or it seems unlikely
that we will ever be able to fix all the variables
to attribute them to the translator
and to the translator along the same Mona Baker.
Okay, Magda, actually, has a nice saying
about the work, the task of the translator.
The translator hears voices.
That's what he or she, this is how he or she responds
to the text.
These are authorial narrative and dialogic voices.
To her, the text is voices recorded,
and, in fact, she has a terrifying and harrowing way
of proofreading her own work.
She actually records herself reading her translation
and then makes the correction basing on this material.
I've tried that once.
It's terrifying.
I mean, this is when your own mistakes really hurt you bad.
And the voices are accessible to the translator
through analysis of style, she says.
Okay, now the authorial thumbprint,
I mean, I don't probably have to try to convince many people
in this room that this is true.
The most frequent words are still
one of the favorite methods,
and John Burroughs Delta is among them.
And they usually work, although we don't really know why.
Simply because the image of language as a bag of words
is not something they teach at schools,
or perhaps at some schools, but not at all schools.
So, and also, as you could see from the previous
and other presentations, the specialists differ
on the best parameters, parameter values.
Now, as I said, with the translator or thumbprint,
it's going to be even worse because it's much less evident.
And as I have seen in many analyzers,
even when we analyze the word frequencies of translations,
it's the authors of the original who are visible
and not the translator.
Let me tell you as a translator myself,
I deeply deplore this.
I would like to be seen.
Okay, and of course, this is the old version of the,
this is the new version of the old invisibility course.
And yet sometimes, if you really try,
you can find the translator.
So as you can see, it is a very cautious optimism,
if we can call that optimism,
with which I'm approaching this authorial
or translatorial problem.
Now, of course, the main role in stylometry
is that all the best ideas are immediately grabbed
by John Burroughs.
So barely had he invented his Delta
when he made a beautiful study
of the English translations of the Latin poet Juvenal.
And since he was translated among other people
by Dryden and Dr. Johnson,
he could also compare them with the original writings
of the two poets.
And he found that Dryden is able to conceal his hand,
but Johnson strikes his own note and holds it.
As David Hoover commented,
Delta also in that study shows subtle authorial markers
that persist even when submerged
beneath the style of a translation,
which is again a cautionary remark for me.
Okay, so this is Delta.
Now, the way this works in this test
is that I use a Delta distance table
that was later analyzed by cluster analysis.
And then the results of the cluster analysis
were bootstrapped.
I was using a lot of cluster analysis results
for a wide variety of most frequent word
and culling parameters.
So what it looks like is we get all the texts,
we get raw frequencies out of them,
then we get the Delta distances,
and then we have one cluster analysis tree,
two cluster analysis trees, and so on,
and so forth for rising numbers of most frequent words
until we get a bootstrap consensus tree,
and all that of course is done by our preferred,
our script mostly by Bache Edder,
and actually I love it because it puts the colors together.
So that obviously works for prose in the original
and prose in English.
Let's see, I mean for a bigger corpus, there you go.
The colors also stick together
and the Bronte sisters even stick together, some of them.
Okay, now let's look what happens
when we take first a corpus in English,
which matches the authors perfectly,
and let's now translate it into Polish
by a number of translators.
And what we get is not as good, but still nice.
Conrad is right here, so is Wolf.
We have a little glitch with green,
we have probably with Bleak House,
but Montgomery is here, and Jane Austen is here,
and actually some of the translators
did more than one book here.
We have Mihau Philipptug of Translation of Austen
and his Translation of Heart of Darkness,
and I think another one here.
So actually the only translator
who seems to have a consistent voice
is Ruzha Tsetner Shverova right here,
who's Willette and the Man of Property come together,
possibly because her language is quite antiquated
that these are fairly old translations,
about 100 years old.
So you can see that to find the translator
is not very easy, that the authors usually are stronger
even in translation.
Okay, this is just quickly the Lord of the Rings in Polish,
the three different translations,
they are all grouped by one of the six books
of the three volumes.
That is when you take the sort of the usual big number
of parameters and a wide range of most frequent words,
if you limit them to 150,
and if you get rid of all the words
that do not appear in all the texts in the story,
one of the translators finally gets his own voice.
Now, when I showed this in Poland,
the Polish Tolkien crazies start vigorously nodding
because this is the generally unpopular
and reviled translation, so everyone's happy.
Okay, so finally, Reveno anno Mutton,
the text was divided into 37 equal sections
of about 5,000 word tokens each.
I only allowed Magda to tell me that Anna Kowice Kostertin
that translated the first chunk
and that she herself translated the final chunk.
And I preferred not to know what happened with the others.
And this was the most consistent looking
bootstrap consensus tree.
And of course, we see that we have two nodes here
and my blood pressure really went up
when I saw that this smaller chunk consists
of chunks 27 till the end of the book.
So I'm getting a result where there is a certain moment
in the book where the two texts are split.
And so at this point, I decided I can pick up the phone again
and call Magda and say, and identify the spot.
There was a silence down on the line and she said, yes.
So I don't know whether I was lucky
or whether that actually works,
but I'd prefer to actually to the latter
if you will allow me this optimism.
Okay, so the result found the rift around section 27.
So Magda told me the truth.
Kowice Kostertin translated sections one to 25.
The chapter corresponding roughly to section 26
was left in a very rough draft with words like blah, blah
or whatnot within the text.
Actually, it was a very rough draft.
Magda's own translation begins with section 27,
which is the result I sort of got.
And what about Magda's editorial changes?
Because of course that also modified
the final result of the book.
Well, this is the extent to which Heydl edited Kowice.
I mean, the amount of the red,
this is by far not the most extreme example.
This is a hugely edited text.
And yet the authorship of the translation
is still visible.
I must say that I only saw that sometime
after seeing the result on the Bouboutraps Consensus Tree
and I sort of, I couldn't believe my eyes.
Now, as to the dubious chapter 20, section 26,
this is actually, this is one of the blah, blah, whatever
statements left over from the Kowice conversion.
The bluish things are changes introduced by Heydl.
So actually, this is a totally,
I mean, you can see it's as colorful as anything.
And this is still shown to be Kowice,
the author of the crossed out first version,
which is something that again,
enhances my disbelief in this whole thing.
Okay, now, just to make sure that we are back to normal,
once we add more than one book to the corpus,
things turn, things are, as I said, back to normal now.
So if you want me to feel good,
you can agree with me that this is because,
well, this is the effect of Heydl's editorial changes
that the two parts of night and day are here together.
But I guess it's just Wolf showing her head, if you want.
Of course, it's a pity that Kowice and Heydl
never translated another author together,
or even never translated the books of the same authors,
but what can you do?
So, and when you add other authors
who translated the same books as Kowice did,
we're back to normal, all this is Wolf.
Actually, there's just one Wolf translation
that somehow runs away from the Wolf pack.
You see what I did here.
But then the McCarthy books are all together
and Conrad is right here.
And actually, I first, of course, I made,
I was a little afraid what to do with that,
since, of course, the translator,
the Polish translator of the satanic verses is anonymous,
and I don't think I'm giving anyone away.
So this was safe to show.
So the conclusions, if there are any conclusions
to be drawn from such negative results,
is that the authorial sign,
despite the brilliant finding of stylometry,
is stronger than that of the translator.
And actually, at this point, Magda comes in
with her view of what I did
and what she does to text,
as she calls my view the distant view,
and she calls the traditional stylistics the close view,
because you see more,
you see the particular changes to the text,
but still, and that close view is somewhat different
from the distant view,
and if the twain could meet, that would really be heaven.
Thank you very much.
APPLAUSE
OK, the problem with multivacuation...