Triangulating text relationship in literary retranslation: The Great Gatsby in Chinese

Abstract In the scenario of literary retranslation, the presence of a previous translation necessarily has influence on retranslators. Systemic analyses of relevant features are needed to reveal the potential influence that an earlier translation exerts on a later one and the strategies the latter takes as a response. Starting with the assumption that a distinctive translation can be identified with a set of consistent features, this study examines the relationship between translations with The Great Gatsby and its nine Chinese versions as a case in point, with a novel method of corpus triangulation. For the discovery of the most effective set of distinctive features, a multi-class Support Vector Machine algorithm is applied on twenty-one linguistic features related to vocabulary, grammar, and textuality for the classification of samples from the nine versions. A principal components analysis then follows to verify the multi-dimensionality of a translation and the intertwinement of its features. Finally, further aided with a sentiment analysis, we examine the faithfulness of translations and their distances from each other. Through cross-validation, this study finds: (1) With the shared source text, different translations show a certain, and in some pairs striking, degree of resemblance both in terms of linguistic features and in the sentiment-based narrative plot; (2) the dependency relation between retranslations and earlier ones is usually manifested in measurable linguistic features; (3) linguistic features of a text are normally combined in a complicated manner and features of different categories inextricably intertwined; (4) the trend of proximity proposed by the Retranslation Hypothesis is discernible in the retranslations; and (5) cross-validation between the examination of linguistic features and sentiment analysis proves to be an effective approach for measuring the distance between translations and the closeness of a translation to the original.