An Eye-Tracking Study of Equivalent Effect in Translation: The Reader Experience of Literary Style

This book provides a detailed example of an eye-tracking method for comparing the reading experience of a literary source text readers with readers of a translation at stylistically marked points. Drawing on principles, methods and inspiration from fields including translation studies, cognitive psychology, and language and literary studies, the author proposes an empirical method to investigate the notion of stylistic foregrounding, with 'style' understood as the distinctive manner of expression in a particular text. The book employs Raymond Queneau’s Zazie dans le métro (1959) and its English translation Zazie in the Metro (1960) as a case study to demonstrate the proposed methods. This book will be of particular interest to students and scholars of translation studies, as well as those interested in literary reception, stylistics and related fields.

Callum Walker is a lecturer in translation technology at the University of Leeds and an honorary research fellow at University College London. His research focuses on how biometric methods can be employed to gauge stylistic and phenomenological equivalence between a source text and its translation, with a particular focus on language varieties.