'Seeing' the Literary Text through Voyant: Digital Tools in Literary Translation

Date: February 3, 2025
Time: 4pm
Location: MIC Conference Room, S-147 Social and Behavioral Sciences (SBS)

The literary translator seeks to understand as much as possible about the source text and source language(s) before translating, not to mention the means of revising the translation through informed, comparative analysis of the source and translated text. Web-based text reading and analysis tools such as “Voyant” contribute to translation quality by extracting quantifiable information from texts that facilitates reading and interpretation. Part One of this two-part presentation offers an overview of my course, “Literary Translation in Transit: Using Digital Tools with Literary Texts.” It will feature examples from the work of literary translation students from Chinese, French, German, Japanese and Russian. The second part of the talk will consist of a case study using “Voyant” to analyze the French and English translations of a novel written by the Italo-Somali writer Ubah Cristina Ali Farah. This research has been conducted by PhD student Alessandra Balzani and me for a book chapter we have recently submitted.

Speaker: Clorinda Donato

Clorinda Donato is professor of French and Italian at California State University, Long Beach, where she directs the Clorinda Donato Center for Global Romance Languages and Translation Studies. She specializes in translated compilations and translation in gender studies. Publications include The ‘Encyclopédie’ in Spain (Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment 2015) and Translation and Transfer of Knowledge in Encyclopedic Compilations 1680–1830s, co-edited with Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink (Toronto 2021); Forthcoming in 2025 is “Translating Libertine Literature: The Sexual Epistemologies of Diderot's The Indiscreet Jewels” in the Routledge Handbook for Translation and Sexuality and “Navigating America in the Italian Translations of the Encyclopedie methodique: Establishing an Italian Perspective on the Colonial World through Translation, in the volume Nouveaux savoirs du Monde, Garnier.