Filling a Gap between Integrated Methods in the Digital Corpus Study of Literary Retranslations: The Case of To the Lighthouse into Italian

Digital technologies can be used to complement traditional descriptive translation studies (DTS) with various types of textual explorations. However, there is still a historical discrepancy between the digital corpus techniques applied to DTS drawing on corpus linguistics mainly focusing on linguistic features of translation and the DTS focusing on non-linguistic categories. Drawing on Zanettin’s (2011, 2013) proposed interpretative annotations, the methodology developed here extends the digital corpus approach to investigate whether and how the non-linguistic modernist features of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse are rendered in multiple (re)translations into Italian. This extension of the corpus approach fits with Bassnett’s and Lefevere’s (1990) ‘cultural turn’ from linguistic translation theories to Even-Zohar’s (1978/2012, 1979) and Toury’s (1980, 1981, 1995) polysystems theory for contextual (historical, social, and cultural) explanations, which are the defining basis of the DTS approach. In the case study considered here, the exhaustive and complete analysis demonstrates that the multiple retranslations are ‘modernist’ only marginally.