Translation

Discussions of translation often focus on the ineffable losses created by moving from one language to another. Yet translation may also leave (or even produce) a residue of the original language, traces of the fact that a text did not start its life in the language the reader encounters. In this project, we used a corpus of short stories translated into English from Russian, French, Spanish, Korean, Italian, Indonesian, German, and Portuguese to examine whether translation leaves a lexical or grammatical trace on its arrival in English and how these traces may vary by language. We hoped to uncover the stylistic affordances of translation as such, gesture toward an atlas of the formal effects of translation into English, and potentially generate a few practical findings for translators.