Original e tradução de obras canônicas e populares em perspectiva: A análise de corpus como um recurso à crítica literária

The possibility of challenging traditional practices is one of the advantages of carrying out computer analyses. Using computational tools, this paper looks at what happens in terms of lexical choices when a literary text is translated. To this purpose, it resorts to the notion of creativity and innovation embedded in the concept of literariness. Four canonical and non-canonical literary works both in their original and translated versions are analyzed so as to observed variation and the extent to which they confirm or disclaim the attribution of canonicity. The results of this contrastive study show that populat fiction may be as rich as canonical texts as far as language choices are considered. From a general perspective, it brings contributions to language-based empirical observations of literature, thus avoiding hermeneutic argumentation.