How far can automatic translation engines be used as a tool for stylistic analysis?

Abstract

This pilot study investigates the potential of automatic translation engines to be used as a tool for literary stylistic analysis. By translating from English into one of 62 languages and then re-translating back into English, the resulting texts were compared with a stylistic analysis of the original. Although the similarity index varied widely between languages - between 90% and 32.9% - many stylistic features were retained. However, more subtle features of the texts were lost in the translation process. The similarity index gives a good indication of the literary subtlety / quality of the text, suggesting that this process may be useful as a preliminary “filtering” technique in deeper stylistic studies.