Literary Digital Stylistics in Translation Studies. Anna Maria Cipriani

Literary Digital Stylistics in Translation Studies by Dr Anna Maria Cipriani (University College London) is a recent addition to Springer’s New Frontiers in Translation Studies series edited by Professor Defeng Li (University of Macau). This monograph offers a comprehensive exploration of the translation of modernist literary features of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse into Italian. The book employs a mixed-method approach, integrating both qualitative and quantitative analyses to examine the linguistic and extra-linguistic features across its eleven Italian translations. The structure of the book is systematically organized into six chapters. Chapter 1 introduces the concept of literary digital stylistics within the context of translation studies. It begins by defining literary digital stylistics from both linguistic and extra-linguistic perspectives and positions the subject within the broader literature. The author argues that the novelty of this study lies in its extension of corpus translation studies beyond the linguistic (lexico-grammatical) to include extra-linguistic features, such as stream of consciousness, indirect interior monologue, and free indirect discourse. The methodology is complex in its incorporation of both qualitative and quantitative assessments and its enhancement of the corpus approach through micro- and macro-level literary analyses. The study broadens the scope of descriptive corpus-based translation studies by examining ‘what is narrated to study whether and how it is proposed in (re)translation’ (p. 11, original italics). The author applies the retranslation hypothesis as a template or ‘reference prediction’ (p. 18) to analyse the Italian retranslations of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.