Stylistic analysis using machine translation as a tool

Tess Crosbie
,
Tim French
,
Marc Conrad

Research Output: Contribution to journal Article Peer-review

Abstract

This pilot study investigates the potential of automatic translation engines to be used as a tool for literary analysis. Two sample texts, one prose and one poetry, were chosen as representative of their genre and translated from English into one of 62 languages. Re-translated back into English, the resulting texts were compared with a stylistic analysis of the original. Many stylistic features were retained although more subtle features of the texts were lost in the translation process. The similarity index varied widely between languages – between 90% and 32.9% -with corresponding stylistic feature retention observed. The similarity index gives a good indication of the literary quality of the text, suggesting that this process may be useful as a preliminary “filtering” technique in deeper studies.

Publication Information

Output type

Research Output: Contribution to journal Article Peer-review

Original language

English

Journal (Volume, Issue Number)

International Journal for Infonomics (Volume 1, Issue 1)

Publication milestones

Published - 01/01/2013

Publication status

Published - 01/01/2013

ISSN

1742-4712

External Publication IDs

handle.net: 10547/333145