The novel under study by the Egyptian author and Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz is one of the most controversial novels in the history of modern Egyptian (and Arabic) literature. Originally published in serials in the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram in 1959, the highly allegorical novel which resonates with George Orwell’s narrative style, caused ripples among the Egyptian readership and beyond with long-lasting effects. The novel ended up earning its author both condemnations from religious figures and praises from international institutions. It was specifically cited as one of the premises of awarding Mahfouz in 1988 the only Nobel Prize in Literature awarded to an Arab author until now. The Swedish Academy described it as “an unusual novel”, in its press release announcing the prize (1988), where the main theme is “man’s everlasting search for spiritual values”. Depicting the religious and social history of man, the novel uses the narrative framework of a Cairo alley to chronicle developments from Genesis to modern times. With careful allegorical delineations of arguably God, Satan and a number of prophets, the novel outraged religious leaders accusing the author of verging on heresy, and is often seen as a motivation for the assassination attempt on Mahfouz in 1994.

But the debates surrounding the novel since its publication in Arabic did not stop there; they also extended to its English translations. Awlad Haratina, which has been translated to many languages, is famously known to have two different English translations. The first one by Philip Stewart was published in 1981 by Heinemann under the name “Children of Gebelawi” Mahfouz. However, copyright issues exacerbated by the controversy surrounding its reception and motivated by its author’s post-Nobel Prize fame, led to another translation to be commissioned by the American University in Cairo. Thus, the second translation by Peter Theroux was published by Doubleday in 1996 under the title “Children of the Alley” Mahfouz.

Writers, journalists and researchers have been interested in discussing and chronicling the legacy of Awlad Haratina as well as the contexts of commissioning its two translations with a 15 years gap in between (Abu-Haidar; Ewais; Shoair). The two translations have also been the subject of several studies which analysed them from a wide variety of perspectives (Lundquist; Roded; Torabi and Seyedi; El-Gabalawy; Hezam, among others). Moreover, and perhaps less commonly, the two translators themselves engaged in commenting on each other’s work in a somewhat lengthy and public debate (Stewart; Theroux, “Children of the Alley: A Translator’s Tale”; Theroux, “Naguib Mahfouz’s Children of the Alley”). However, very few attempted to actually highlight the stylistic differences between the two translations in a systematic way. Therefore, this study aims to fill this gap by applying stylometric and corpus-assisted distant reading techniques in order to compare the two translations and highlight stylistic similarities and differences between them. The quantitative and data-driven analysis sheds a new light on the English translations as texts and provides a different angle to viewing each translator’s style.

The paper tries to answer the following questions:

The paper is organised as follows: section 2 provides background information on the wider area of corpus studies of translation and translator style through a brief review of relevant literature. Section 3 briefly presents the two translations under study and the circumstances of their publication. Section 4 introduces the data and methodology, outlining the corpus-assisted and computational techniques utilised in the study. Section 5 presents the results of the analysis. Section 6 discusses the interpretation of the results as indicators of the stylistic identity of the translators as well as a reflection of the wider social context in which the two translations were produced. Finally, the paper ends with some concluding remarks on the affordances of the corpus-assisted distant reading approach in studying translator style.

The huge developments in corpus linguistics in the last few decades meant that its intersecting points with other disciplines would become hot spots for research. The field of translation studies is no exception. In addition to corpus-assisted methodologies and corpus-based machine translation techniques which help in the activity of translation itself, corpus linguistics has also been increasingly beneficial to descriptive translation studies. There are several areas of interest in corpus-based translation studies, including research into translation universals (Baker, “Corpus Linguistics and Translation Studies: Implications and Applications”; Mauranen and Kujamäki), translation norms (Malmkjær, “Norms and Nature in Translation Studies”; Munday), language change (House; Kranich et al.) and individual variation among translators (Saldanha; Baker, “The Treatment of Variation in Corpus-Based Translation Studies”). This study follows the latter line of research strands.

The aim of corpus-based studies of individual variation in translations is to investigate translator style. The concept of translator style has been extensively discussed in relation to translational stylistics (Baker, among others). Generally speaking, translator style refers to the individual writing and translating choices made by a translator when translating a text from one language to another. This can include decisions about word choice, sentence structure, cultural references, idioms and the overall tone and style of the translation. According to Newmark, translator style is “the individual way a translator expresses the message of the SL text in the TL version, which may be determined by his register, his culture and his personality” (54). Venuti (Translator’s Invisibility) expresses a similar opinion when he argues that the translator’s style is a reflection of his or her ideological, cultural and professional identities.

Despite the previous definitions, or perhaps because of them, Saldanha acknowledges that the notion of style “is a notoriously vague concept” (26). Hence, she attempts to outline a methodological approach in defining it. According to her, there are mainly two approaches: (a) source text (ST)-oriented studies (e.g. Malmkjær; Boase-Beier); and (b) target text (TT)-oriented studies (e.g. Baker) of translator style. As the names suggest, studies in the first group focus on the style of the translation, rather than the translator, since it is defined by its relation to the ST. Yet, Boase-Beier (4) also extends this view to outline four different ways style can have a role in translation (as Figure 1 illustrates) where it exploits the intersection of ST and TT on one hand, and author’s/translator’s choices and effect on readers on the other.

At the other end of this spectrum, TT-oriented studies of style focus entirely on the translated texts, usually by comparing features in two or more corpora of different translators without direct reference to the ST. Furthermore, Youdale (180) highlights some of the factors which can influence a translator’s style seen as points on a continuum of conscious vs unconscious elements of a translator’s style (see Figure 2). The nature of a continuum implies fuzzy distinction lines, and the author acknowledges this as he explains that “different aspects of style may be located at different points along the continuum, and these points themselves may vary from translator to translator and also vary over time” (Youdale 181).

Computer-assisted translation studies, i.e. those which use computational methods and tools to analyse the writing and translating choices made by translators, have transformed the study of translator style. Such studies usually follow a specific design: a parallel corpus (monolingual or bilingual) and a set of “linguistic indicators”, as Zanettin (21) calls them, to act as formal operators in the study. Li et al. (106–08) and Youdale (183) provide some examples of corpus designs and formal operators which are also used in the domain of forensic stylistics. Some of the typical formal operators include:

An important caveat to note with this quantitative approach is that it does not aim to present an exhaustive description of a translator’s style. As Li et al. explains, “the intent is not so much to find out what is the translator’s style but rather whether she leaves thumbprints in the translated text, and if affirmative, what are some of the thumbprints” (109). This is what this study aims to do; i.e. to compare the translators’ thumbprints in the two translations of this important literary work and to highlight some of the characteristic linguistic features for each translator. In doing so, we can capture what Baker calls the “individual profile of linguistic habits” for a translator.

Perhaps no other modern Arabic novel continues to conjure up debates since its initial publication in the late fifties until now as Awlad Haratina. El-Gabalawi (94) attempts an explanation as he argues that in this work “Mahfouz boldly explores areas of religious thought where most Egyptian writers fear to tread even in the contemporary age of relative liberalism.” However, while religious interpretations of the novel were primarily responsible for its blustery reception, others have recognised that it goes beyond that. (Hawthorne) writes in the New York Times, “religion is only one element of a larger critique of an entrenched patriarchal authoritarianism that extends from the familial to the political.” It is also worth mentioning that the publication and reception of the Arabic text was confounded from the start by the interplay of both religion and politics. One reflection of this is that the publication of the original text serialised in the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram was only possible due to the interference of the Egyptian President at the time Gamal Abdel Nasser, while the first time the novel was published in a book was in 1962, not in its native country, but in Beirut, Lebanon. The novel’s literal and allegorical layers of meaning associated with its characters and events are also engulfed in a deep sense of social protest, which can be deemed alarming or commendable depending on one’s point of view. This combination of serious, even radical, ideas had a long-lasting impact on the novel and its interpretation, extending to its English translations as well.

As mentioned before, the first English translation of Awlad Haratina was published in 1981 under the name “Children of Gebelawi”. The translator is Philip Stewart, the then young Oxford graduate who was commissioned to translate an already controversial work at the beginning of his career. Once commissioned with the translation, Stewart reportedly flew to Cairo and actually worked closely with Mahfouz himself during the process (but see Khalifa for a discussion of how both translators claimed access to the ST author). Another claim made by (Stewart), and backed up by (Allen), is that his translation is arguably the only complete version of the novel in any language, including Arabic, since the original Arabic manuscript was lost and some discrepancies have been noted both in the serialised version of Al-Ahram and the Beirut version.

After Mahfouz was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1988, a relaunch of the English translation of the novel to the world stage was deemed necessary. Due to copyright complications, another translation was commissioned with a different translator. This time it was the American writer and translator Peter Theroux who undertook the task. His translation was published in 1996 under the title “Children of the Alley”. A more experienced translator, Theroux has worked with other Arabic novels from different Arab countries including Iraq and Saudi Arabia. Theroux’s translation would be technically considered a ‘retranslation’, a term often used in the literature to refer to any translation of a source text which follows a previous translation (by a different translator) in the same target language (Mathijssen; Van Poucke; Brownlie, among others). Interestingly, the translator himself, who noted that his translated book “has had a much more interesting life” than him (Theroux, “Children of the Alley: A Translator’s Tale” 671), acknowledges that Mahfouz’s “deeply spiritual and questioning novel […] mirrors the stories of the Torah, Gospels and Koran”- an interpretation he shares with many of the novel’s critics and one that Mahfouz himself never explicitly expressed.

Therefore, both translations of the novel appeared in testing times. Stewart‘s translation came out against the backdrop of a contentious reception of the original text in Egypt and the Arab world, while Theroux’s translation came out in a rather complex socio-cultural context torn between international praise and local condemnation. Several critical reviews/studies of both translations appear in the literature (e.g. Cachia; Ghorab; Khalifa, where some of them recognise the significance of the concept of retranslation in the discussion of this work. Although some studies (e.g. Susam-Sarajeva) argue that retranslation is a phenomenon which lacks a detailed or systematic study, there have been several attempts to define it. According to Baker (“Retranslation as Rewriting” 156), “retranslation is a practice that challenges the notion of a fixed original text and disrupts the hierarchies of linguistic and cultural dominance”. Snell-Hornby (83) largely agrees with this characterisation and explains that “retranslation offers an opportunity to reflect on the status of the target language, its culture, and the implications of the previous translation”. Indeed, much has been said about the relationship between a retranslation and the previous one, most notably regarding the motivations for producing a retranslation in the first place. Venuti (Retranslations 26), for example, sees a retranslation as largely triggered by competition, hence its need to assert its difference. He argues, in particular, that “retranslations are designed deliberately to form particular identities’’ (26) as he emphasises that retranslations are not just a form of rewriting, but of reinterpreting, the text.

While different studies have focussed on various aspects of the identities and assumptions associated with a retranslation, there has been a strong argument for the view that retranslations signal shifts in the ideological context of reception of a certain literary work. As Venuti explains, retranslations could be “a way of reshaping the target text to better suit the target culture” (Venuti, “Retranslations: The Creation of Value” 37). The case of the two English translations of Awlad Haratina would be a great example to test this hypothesis. Going beyond the traditional view of a necessary chronological ageing of a translation so that it requires a new one, Pym (82) highlights the “active rivalry” that defines multiple translations of the same source text. In his recent study, Khalifa (Khalifa, “The Hidden Violence of Retranslation: Mahfouz’s Awlād Ḥāratinā in English” 147) takes this assumption even further and defines retranslation as “an act of defiance”. Thus, he considers the case of the two translations of Awlad Haratina as “a site for struggle between competing translatorial agents.” (145) He emphasises the rivalry between the two translators describing it as “combative interactions” (146) and elaborates on this through the analysis of, not the texts themselves, but the paratexts (introductions and commentaries by the translators) of the two translations. As mentioned before, the two translators did not shy away from commenting on each other’s translations. While Theroux publicly described the translation of his predecessor as “perfectly adequate” and “pioneering” (Theroux, “Children of the Alley: A Translator’s Tale” 668), he also referred to some “bad qualities” of previous Mahfouz translations (quoted in Khalifa).

This study brings back the focus to the actual texts of the two translations by employing computational and stylometric processes to highlight the distinct stylistic identities of the two translators. By interpreting these results, we also aim to shed light on some of the defining features of retranslations which ultimately qualify the relationship between the two translations of Awlad Haratina.

To the best of our knowledge, there is currently no published research which specifically compares translator style in the two English translations of Awlad Haratina following a corpus-assisted or a computational approach. This study aims to rely on computational-stylistic analysis to inform our understanding and interpretation of the differences between the two translations. The analysis is largely data-driven as the aim is to neutralise all other variables and focus on translator style with the purpose, as Youdale (184) explains, “to perform an ‘x-ray’ of basic linguistic features which a close reading of even a short passage would be unlikely to reveal”. The analysis is based on two sub-corpora named: Gebelawi [Stewart] and Alley [Theroux] in the chronological order of their publication. After obtaining the digitised version of the two translations, some pre-processing was done to clean the data from digitising errors (fixing spacing errors, fixing mistakes in converting some letters, deleting running titles, etc). Then, the two translations were also aligned at chapter level to allow a more detailed comparison by Chapter. Therefore, the data was analysed in two forms: (a) as individual whole texts saved in separate sub- corpora; and (b) as comparable texts aligned at chapter level. Both translations follow the original division of the ST which includes 114 chapters spread over 5 parts.

The quantitative analysis includes several levels, which required the use of both corpus management software (Sketch Engine, Kilgariff et al.) and machine learning techniques. In particular, the analysis explores the following aspects:

In this section, we present the results of the computational-stylistic analysis of the two English translations of Mahfouz’s novel Awlad Haratina.

The analysis in this study has computed several linguistic features at various levels in the two translations in order to tease out their unique characteristics. The main purpose is to illustrate how quantifiable features such as types, tokens, hapax words, sentence length, lexical bundles, readability grades, collocations, etc. can act as discovery tools for identifying patterns of translator style. The results clearly highlight some stylistic divergences between the two translations. This is a summary of the results:

In order to interpret these results, we will have to refer to two factors working in parallel: the concept of retranslation and the social context of producing the two translations. In terms of lexical variety and richness, these results seem to be consistent with assumptions regarding retranslations which are typically produced in direct competition with an earlier translation. In this case, given the copyright problems which engulfed the first translation and motivated the need for a second one, it could be argued that the second translation of Awlad Haratina was meant to be ‘better’, i.e. lexically richer, longer and more stylistically appealing than the first. This is supported by the analysis of word count, hapax words and sentence length which shows that Alley has higher numbers in all of these categories.

Additionally, Alley also scored higher in 5 out of the 9 readability tests applied in the study. These results reflect how the variables of vocabulary and sentence structure can affect the readers’ experience while reading a particular text. Although these tests employ different mathematical formulae in measuring difficulty, they mostly rely on quantifiable features such as word length, sentence length and frequency. Therefore, the results are not only another indicator of differences in translators’ style, but they also tie in with one of the early hypotheses on retranslations, i.e. that first translations, compared to subsequent ones, are generally motivated by creating an easy level of readability (Gambier 414). Therefore, the lower scores on the readability tests for Gebelawi reflect a simpler, more manageable reading experience, which is supported by a shorter text with lower lexical variety and more frequent lexical bundles. Indeed, the translator himself implies the intention to create an easy read as he says in the introduction to his translation that it “is aimed at the general reader with no prior knowledge of the Arab world; no words have been used that cannot be found in a good English dictionary” (Stewart 59).

The only time Gebelawi scored higher was in the lexical bundles analysis. Lexical bundles have been described as “building blocks” in discourse (Biber and Barbieri 277) which have a statistical tendency to co-occur but are not easily detectable without the aid of computers. Analysis of lexical bundles in translation studies have been growing since Baker’s (Baker, “The Treatment of Variation in Corpus-Based Translation Studies”) pioneering work, and they have been considered a useful measure of linguistic differences between translations of the same source text. According to Lee (382), translated texts are expected to rely heavily on high-frequency lexical bundles “if they are geared toward fluency and readability”. It seems that Gebelawi achieved this as the analysis shows Stewart’s translation was constructed as an easier text to read. However, with the attention the Arabic novel gained in the post-Nobel era, this perhaps put more pressure on the second translation to be different. The focus seems to have shifted from creating an easy read to creating a translation that is closer to the ST and one that is more stylistically nuanced. In this sense, Theroux’s translation seems to fit in with the assumption that retranslations are expected to be more attentive to the style of the ST2 (Gürçağlar), as was also supported by the analysis of character names in the two translations.

The distant reading approach, enabled by corpus analysis tools, was used in this study to help in painting a clearer picture of the translators’ style by tracing some of their linguistic thumbprints. We looked into the use of character names and some high frequency words/structures to reveal a few differences between the translations. The analysis of these samples from the text seem to show that Theroux’s translation follows the ST more closely both in its depiction of characters and the centrality of the “alley” in the narrative space as reflected in the frequency and distribution of these linguistic items. The differences in the types of collocations of the word “alley” in the two translations also shows that the concept of “the alley” has more agency and dynamism in the second translation being the subject of numerous verbs, while it collocates with more modifiers in the first translation indicating a rather descriptive tone. This argument could be perhaps extended to explain the change in the title itself from Children of Gebelawi in the first translation to Children of the Alley in the second to be seen as more than just a necessary differentiating feature of a re-translation. That is, it could be perceived as projecting a focus of the narrative onto the place as well as its people. While further analysis needs to be done with regards to this point, these initial results are another indication of a stylistically distinctive choice on part of the translators and can pave the way for literary critics to support/refute their arguments.

Finally, the stylometric analysis of the two translations, which is based on the distribution of the most frequent words in the texts (at chapter level), showed that the two can be computationally distinguished in two of the tests employed.Therefore, machine learning techniques were shown to successfully distinguish between the two translations, and illustrated that textual metrics are strong indicators of translator style in line with previous studies (e.g. Lynch and Vogel, Claesen). Pooling all these quantitative results, this study aims to show that computational and data-driven studies of translated texts can complement descriptive studies which are grounded in literary or translation theories and need to be interpreted within the larger social and cultural contexts of the production and reception of the translation. In this sense, it becomes increasingly important to “understand the specific constraints, pressures and motivations that influence the act of translating and underlie its unique language” as Laviosa (478) points out. That is why the translation and retranslation of Awlad Haratina can be the perfect example for the study of such constraints and pressures for which no single factor can assume sole responsibility. This is a case of a novel laden with claims of religious or political allegorical interpretations and with two translations divided by a world-class prize that brought the ST to global centre stage. Therefore, the language in both translations would surely be influenced by multiple factors, which Pym (146) described as “the entourage of patrons, publishers, readers and politics”. The quantitative study of these two translations thus complements (Khalifa)’s focus on the sociology of translation which includes an examination of the various agents involved including the publishers, the translators and the paratext of both translations.

Decades after the first publication of Awlad Haratina and after being translated into many languages, it still proves to be a work of many dimensions, and definitely one which defies one single interpretation. According to Venuti (34), “translations are profoundly linked to their historical moment”. This is truly the case with these two translations, which, as many critics noted, are different because they were commissioned and published in very different, yet equally stressful, circumstances thanks to the controversy engulfing the source text. This study presented a corpus-driven stylistic analysis of the two English translations of Mahfouz’s Awlad Haratina with the aim to show that quantifying stylistic features in a systematic way can shed some light on translator’s styles and contribute to the study of retranslation in the context of this particular novel.

The very notion of translator style has proved to be an elusive phenomenon. However, computational and corpus-driven studies have helped systematise the study of style by isolating those linguistic features which can reveal the translator’s thumbprints or, as Youdale (178) calls them, the “unconscious translation habits”. Such habitual patterns of linguistic usage, examined through variables such as frequency, word and sentence length, lexical bundles, etc., provide a solid starting point for answering questions related to both the production and reception of any translation, and especially in the cases of comparing translations of the same text. Even when dealing with such a giant figure in modern Arabic literature like Mahfouz and arguably his most famous novel, this study wanted to show that a translation can never simply be a vehicle for the reproduction of the authorial style of the ST. By focusing on the texts of the two translations and teasing out the specific patterns in their respective texts, the study hopes to contribute to the area of computational translation stylistics in general and to studies of Awlad Haratina in particular as a unique literary work both in its original language and its translations.