Mark my keywords: A translator-specific exploration of style in literary machine translation

This chapter presents a keyword analysis of a novel post-edited by the internationally acclaimed translator Hans-Christian Oeser. The novel, Christopher Isherwood's The World in the Evening, was first machine-translated into German using DeepL and then post-edited by Oeser. The analysis identifies words that are key in Oeser's post-edited text compared to the machine-translated version. It goes on to investigate whether these keywords are characteristic of Oeser's broader translation work and of German literary fiction in general. The chapter concludes that specific edits Oeser makes can be construed as an assertion of his translatorial style and hence constitute an instance of downstream translator-specific personalisation in literary machine translation.