The stylistics and stylometry of collaborative translation: Woolf’s Night and Day in Polish ............................................................................................................................................................ Jan Rybicki and Magda Heydel Jagiellonian University, Krako ´ w, Poland ....................................................................................................................................... Abstract The study investigates to what extent traditional stylistics and non-traditional stylometry can co-operate in the study of translations in terms of translatorial style. Stylistic authorship attribution methods based on a multivariate analysis of most-frequent-word frequencies are used in attempts at identifying translators. While these methods usually identify the author of the original rather than the translator, a case study is presented of the Polish translation of a single novel by Virginia Woolf, Night and Day, in which one translator took over from the other; the point of this takeover has been successfully identified with the above-men- tioned methods. ................................................................................................................................................................................. 1 The Problem A translated work of literature is a collaborative effort even if performed by a single translator, always haunted by the ghost of the author of the original as well as other spectres, namely those of all other intertextualities. The relationship between the author and the translator has been at the centre of mainstream translation studies and in the discip- line’s corpus-based and stylometric varieties, as evi- denced by a growing body of scholarship (Olohan, 2004; Oakes and Ji, 2012). Stylometric problems multiply when the term ‘collaborative translation’ is taken to signify a joint rendering of a single author into a different language by two (or more) translators, or by translator and editor (Rybicki, 2011). In general, stylometry based on multivariate analyses of word frequencies successfully detects the author of the original—rather than the translator— in translations (Rybicki, 2010). Sometimes this suc- cess varies from translator to translator: when Dr Johnson and Dryden translate Juvenal, the former’s style is easily recognizable as that of his own poetry, while Dryden’s is entirely different from that in his own writing (Burrows, 2002b). Similar phenomena have been observed and described in literature-ori- ented translation studies in research that applies the methods of traditional stylistics to analyze how translators might tend to ‘contaminate’ the text of the translation with elements of their own poetics; how writers translated by the same translator appear stylistically more alike in translation than they are in the original; or how the style of translations in a given literary era tend to assimilate the poetic models of their times (Baker, 2000; Munday, 2008: 11–42). Contrarily to such traditional stylistic descrip- tions, stylometric machine-learning methods are usually able to tell translator from translator only when translations of the same author are compared (Rybicki, 2012). This approach has to deal with the additional issue of eliminating any temporal per- spective, as the analysis of word frequencies has to overlook all differences resulting from variations in the historical background underlying the succes- sive versions of the text in translation. In contrast, traditional translation studies discusses the phe- nomenon of retranslation in historical contexts, Correspondence: Jan Rybicki, Institute of English Studies, Jagiellonian University of Krako ´ w, ul. Lojasiewicza 4, 30-348 Krako ´ w, Poland Email: jkrybicki@gmail.com Literary and Linguistic Computing ß The Author 2013. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of ALLC. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com 1 of 10 doi:10.1093/llc/fqt027 Literary and Linguistic Computing Advance Access published May 27, 2013 by guest on May 28, 2013 http://llc.oxfordjournals.org/ Downloaded from