A lexicon-based diachronic comparison of emotions and sentiments in literary translation: A case study of five Chinese versions of David Copperfield

Abstract

In the Chinese context, translations have served as a useful conduit for providing access to wider literature authored in other languages. A prominent question has been whether translators’ linguistic choices are influenced by factors such as translators’ social and cultural background and emotions towards the texts they are translating. When multiple translations of the same text over a span of time are produced, another layer of complexity is introduced, and research such as the present study, must examine how or whether variation in the expression of emotions within translations produced over a period of time is discernible. To this end, the present study made use of Lexicon-based Sentiment Analysis (LBSA), a common natural language processing (NLP) approach, to study people’s attitudes, opinions or emotions towards a certain person or thing. LBSA has attracted much attention in the literary works or translated works for analyzing reader response and appraisal of the works themselves. The present study undertook a diachronic comparison of emotions and sentiments in five translations of David Copperfield based on the emotion lexicons. The corpus of the study comprised translations of five books and 3,084,599 tokens. We applied the computational method of emotion and sentiment analysis to the emotion words in the five translations. In addition, we used python and R package to analyze the positive and negative words in five versions. The study revealed that translators as social beings in the target world express unique reactions towards the same emotion in the original text as well as in literary translations. Yet, the modern vernacular Chinese versions also showcase a similarity in the expression of emotions thus demonstrating the decisive role of the overall flow of emotion in the original plays and in translation. The contribution of the study is significant as it is a pioneering investigation given that it undertakes a sentiment and emotion analysis of literary translations in Chinese.