On translation universals in selected contemporary Polish literary translations

This pilot study attempts to examine the potential of selected corpus linguistics and computational stylistics methods in the investigation of translation universals in translational literary Polish.More specifically, the study deals with T-universals (after Chesterman 2004), which are also referred to as intralingual translation universals (Grabowski 2011), with emphasis on core patterns of lexical use, as proposed by Laviosa (1998, 2002), and the leveling-out hypothesis, as proposed by Baker (1996). To that end, the custom-designed corpora,with approximately 500,000 tokens each, of contemporary translational and non-translational literary Polish were compiled. The results of the study reveal that on the whole translated texts are more varied lexically and have more repetitions and lower lexical variety among top-frequency words than non-translated Polish texts. On the other hand, the study shows that non-translational texts have higher lexical variety among bottom-frequency words, where usually one can find author-specific and creative vocabulary. The results of multivariate methods (Principal Components Analysis and Cluster Analysis) confirm the leveling-out hypothesis that translations are more alike as compared with native texts