ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to open up a debate about the various ways in which computer technology could be productively incorporated into the process of literary translation. The close and distant reading approach is contextualised by looking at the development and current usage in both commercial and literary translation of the two most widely adopted translation technologies: translation memories and machine translation. The impact of these technologies on translators is discussed and summarised. Appropriate corpus linguistic and text-visualisation software for use with the approach is discussed and illustrated, and a comparison chart of various functionalities provided. This is then linked to a prototypical representation of the stages in the literary translation process to create a provisional model of how the approach could work in practice. The final section of the chapter explores the relationship of close and distant reading in literary translation to neighbouring disciplines, concluding that it draws upon, and can offer insights to, corpus and cognitive stylistics, and computational and cognitive or psycho-narratology.
