Fractal self-similarity in the original and translated texts

Safina Z. M.

The article deals with fractal self-similarity in original and translated texts. Literary texts reveal a self-similar lexical structure that determines the stylistic features of a particular author. The novelty of the study is in application of fractal self-similarity to the analysis of the literary text “Grayling; or Murder Will Out” (1841) by the American writer William Gilmore Simms and two translations of the text into Russian made by I. Bernstein (1984) and M. Pavlycheva (2018). A freeware corpus analysis toolkit for concordancing and text analysis AntConc was used to find the ten most frequent lexemes in the original text. It is concluded that fractal self-similarity is exhibited in a certain identity of the lexical structure. The study of two translations showed that self-similarity is not always observed in the translated texts.

Keywords:fractal; fractal self-similarity; literary translation.