Quantifying the faithfulness of poetry translations in four closely related Slavic languages

Abstract Translating poetry is notoriously difficult—some would claim impossible—because it inherently requires making triage decisions what to preserve and what to sacrifice if necessary. Both form and meaning contribute to the esthetic effects of the original, but translations that faithfully preserve the metrical versification principles of the original might struggle to fully preserve lexically conveyed meanings and connotations, and vice versa. Other esthetically relevant sound-related features (e.g. phonemic patterns) are particularly challenging to preserve. This paper presents a pilot study to empirically test this intuition by assessing the faithfulness of translations to their original. Quantifying aspects of the beauty of sound and meaning, that is, the sonority and the esthetic affective potential, of selected poems and their translations in/from Russian, Polish, Czech, and Slovak, that is, a sample controlled for linguistic and cultural context, we measure the degree to which translations correspond to their originals along these dimensions. The results suggest that, for the poems and languages considered, the beauty of sound and meaning are preserved to varying degrees, which can be sensibly interpreted against specific features of the poems, linguistic distances, and cultural prestige. The study thus serves as a proof of concept that demonstrates the basic feasibility of the method applied and foreshadows its potential for advancing empirical studies in the field of comparative poetics.