Repetition and variation in the Catalan translation of Virginia Woolf'sThe years: a corpus-based approach

The present study is a corpus-based contrastive analysis of the use of repetitive patterns in Virginia Woolf's novel The Years (1937) and its Catalan translation (1988) by Maria-Antònia Oliver. For our study, we build a parallel corpus in which both the source text and the translation are aligned, and then focus on three kinds of repetition: (a) The question Where am I?; (b) the phrase hum in time to + N, and (c) the construction ‘verb indicating stillness (sit, stay …) + for a moment + verb of perception.' All these patterns are stylistic devices that Woolf uses for the representation of time in its diverse and overlapping manifestations: as an external measurable dimension and as an internal continuous stream. The use of a parallel corpus allows us to study how all occurrences of these repetitions have been translated into Catalan and to identify the semantic prosody surrounding the three expressions in both English and Catalan. Finally, our corpus-based approach provides evidence for a description of Oliver's translation method, which we define as intentionally literal, though mindful of the numerous stylistic and lyrical effects that can characterize Woolf's prose.