Translation Can Distort the Linguistic Parameters of Source Texts Written in Inflected Language. Case Study: Multidimensional Mathematical Analysis of “The Betrothed”, a Translation in English of “I Promessi Sposi” by A. Manzoni

We compare, mathematically, the text of a famous Italian novel, I promessi sposi written by Alessandro Manzoni (source text), to its most recent English translation, The Betrothed by Michael F. Moore (target text). The mathematical theory applied does not measure the efficacy and beauty of texts, but only their mathematical underlying structure and similarity. The translation theory adopted by the translator is the “domestication” of the source text. The translator justified the almost total replacement of semicolons with periods because English is not as economical in its use of subject pronouns as Italian. Question and exclamation marks, and commas too, were largely modified. These modifications produce several consequences. The short-term memory buffers required to the reader are diverse in Italian and in English. The number of sentence patterns allowed in Italian is about two orders of magnitude greater than in English. The geometrical representation of texts and the related probability of error indicates the two texts are practically uncorrelated. All linguistic channels are very noisy, with very poor signal-to-noise ratio, except the channel related to characters and words. Readability indices are also diverse. In conclusion, a blind comparison of the linguistic parameters of the two texts would unlikely indicate they refer to the same novel.