In this poster, I will present the preliminary results of a project exploring cross-linguistic stylistic transfer in the works of multilingual authors. I will focus on Milan Kundera’s literary and essayistic production in Czech and French, using computational methods to examine how his authorial style adapted, shifted, or remained consistent across languages. The study will investigate the influence of self-translation, professional translation, and cultural displacement on Kundera’s linguistic and semantic patterns. Since multilingual corpora pose significant challenges for computational analysis, I will apply a combination of stylometric methods (e.g., function word frequency analysis) and semantic approaches (e.g., keyword extraction and word embeddings) to identify stylistic transfer at both the formal and thematic levels. I am particularly interested in how Kundera’s move from Czechoslovakia to France, and his shift to writing directly in French, may have impacted his narrative voice and thematic focus. This has been explored in detail by many scholars using traditional literary criticism methods and even Kundera himself; my goal is to test these hypotheses with empirical approach and in turn test how empirical approach might support studies of works of translingual authors. With this goal in mind I will examine whether there are consistent semantic shifts, such as changes in tone, political references, or metaphoric structures, between the Czech and French texts, possibly reflecting different intended audiences or sociopolitical contexts. I hope the poster will encourage exchange of ideas on tackling multilingual corpora not only in computational literary studies, but also in other areas within digital humanities.
Digital Humanities @ Oxford Summer School 2025
Paper Title: From Prague to Paris: Unpacking Kundera’s Stylistic Baggage Using Computational Tools (poster presentation)Speaker: Lucija Mandić
Place: Oxford, UK
Date: 8/4/2025

Abstract: