Virginia Woolf's The waves in French and German waters: a computer assisted study in literary translation

• Published in: Literary and linguistic computing 1996-12, Vol.11 (4), p.175-186
• Main Author: MACZEWSKI, J.-M
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: 20th century; Anonymous writers. Authors; English speaking literatures; French speaking and English speaking literatures; Great Britain. Ireland; History and sciences of litterature; History of literature
• ISSN: 0268-1145; 1477-4615
• DOI: 10.1093/llc/11.4.175

The case study analyses the first chapter of Virginia Woolf's novel The Waves and its two French and three German translations with the help of the PALIMPSEST suite of programs. Specifically created for such tasks, the software provides assistance with viewing the texts in an interlinear format and offers facilities for the automatic generation of multilingual and -textual word and phrase based concordances and statistics. Pursuing the typical aims of literary translation studies, the investigation focuses on an analysis of the relationships between the translations and the original text as well as on a consideration of the influences that can be identified within the corpus of translations; apart from encoding, technical matters are not elaborated upon. The new ways of assessing literary translations offered by PALIMPSEST yield noteworthy results which contribute new empirical evidence to the critical debate on translation in general and on the translations of The Waves in particular. As a result, computer assisted literary translation studies appear as a field of research worth exploring further.