Romance, Suspense, and Translations

Translations were usually valued slightly less than Dutch originals. Participants attributed the lowest mean scores for literary quality to E.L. James’ Fifty Shades of Grey. The Dutch publisher marketed the translations of the Fifty Shades trilogy as Literary novels. To find out if this label indeed suits the novels best, the chapter applies cluster analysis using Burrows’ Delta and principal components analysis (PCA). The same methods are used to explore five novels by Swedish author Henning Mankell, to see whether the style of his Literary novels differs from his Suspense novels. Finally, keyword analysis is applied to get an indication of the fluency of translations, to see whether the results may explain the differences in ratings of originals and translations.