ABSTRACT
This chapter illustrates a fourth use of the close and distant reading approach: enabling a translator to investigate and analyse their own translatorial style in terms of habitual patterns of linguistic usage. The methodology focuses on the identification of linguistic habits which are either wholly or partially unconscious, but which may affect translation. The aim is to develop simple but reliable methods for identifying such habits which can be used by students and literary translators without the need for specialist computing or statistical knowledge. In Section 7.1, an auto-stylistic analysis of two of my translations from Spanish to English is conducted, relating them both to their source texts and in one case to a second translation of the same text by another translator, and six possible tendencies are identified. In Section 7.2, searches are conducted for these six tendencies in subsequent translations from both Spanish and Greek using part-of-speech tags. Evidence was found which suggests that three of these tendencies – switching between present participles or gerunds and infinitives, substituting pairs of dashes for pairs of commas and adding emphasis by increasing the strength of modifiers – might well be part of my translation style, and their potential impact on translation is also assessed.
