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<p>As a highly specialized literary genre, the translation of children’s literature often demands greater attention to stylistic nuances to effectively engage its target audience. However, investigations into the linguistic patterns and stylistic features of translated children’s literary works remain relatively underexplored, particularly regarding the English-Chinese language pair. This study employs a stylometric research design to examine linguistic discrepancies and explore the relationships among three Chinese translations of <i>Peter Pan</i>, a world-renowned work of children’s literature. Classification and clustering experiments were conducted to distinguish the three translations, and attribute selection algorithms were employed to identify the top 10% significant features (33 out of 335) spanning four dimensions: lexical, syntactic, readability, and N-gram. The results show that (1) classification and clustering experiments effectively differentiate the three translations, with Liang’s version consistently exhibiting a distinctive profile, while the Yang &amp; Gu’s and Ren’s versions display a certain degree of similarity; and (2) the most discriminative features distinguishing the translations are primarily concentrated in lexical features and N-gram features. This study demonstrates a data-driven approach to systematically operationalize child-oriented stylistic markers alongside standard metrics. This approach provides empirical grounding for features that have been previously identified through subjective intuition within the context of specific literary translations.</p>

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Unveiling stylometric signatures in translated children’s literature: Peter Pan in Chinese

  • 期刊论文

  • 出版模式：

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  • 发表日期：

    2026年5月28日

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  • Ting He,
  • Delu Kong,
  • Baohu Li

摘要

As a highly specialized literary genre, the translation of children’s literature often demands greater attention to stylistic nuances to effectively engage its target audience. However, investigations into the linguistic patterns and stylistic features of translated children’s literary works remain relatively underexplored, particularly regarding the English-Chinese language pair. This study employs a stylometric research design to examine linguistic discrepancies and explore the relationships among three Chinese translations of Peter Pan, a world-renowned work of children’s literature. Classification and clustering experiments were conducted to distinguish the three translations, and attribute selection algorithms were employed to identify the top 10% significant features (33 out of 335) spanning four dimensions: lexical, syntactic, readability, and N-gram. The results show that (1) classification and clustering experiments effectively differentiate the three translations, with Liang’s version consistently exhibiting a distinctive profile, while the Yang & Gu’s and Ren’s versions display a certain degree of similarity; and (2) the most discriminative features distinguishing the translations are primarily concentrated in lexical features and N-gram features. This study demonstrates a data-driven approach to systematically operationalize child-oriented stylistic markers alongside standard metrics. This approach provides empirical grounding for features that have been previously identified through subjective intuition within the context of specific literary translations.