Estimation of Similarity Between Poetic Texts and their Translations by Means of Discriminant Analysis

The purpose of the paper is to find the degree of difference/similarity of several verse texts: poems by John Keats and translations of these poems into Russian made by different authors. To achieve this goal a deductive classification approach is used which is based on a multivariate discriminant analysis. Metric, rhyme, rhythmical, syntactic characteristics of the original texts and their translations serve as variables which form the multidimensional space of the investigation.