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ebeshero / Amadis-in-Translation

a project to apply TEI markup to investigate early modern Spanish editions of Amadis de Gaula and their translations into English and French from the 1500s to the early nineteenth century.
http://amadis.newtfire.org
GNU Affero General Public License v3.0
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Version Variation Visualization (VVV) and translation metrics #65

Open ebeshero opened 7 years ago

ebeshero commented 7 years ago

@setriplette @HelenaSabel I've been wanting to learn more about other projects doing computational approaches to translation, to see what we might learn and adapt. This one seems really important: the Version Variation Visualization project, and you may already know about it: they produced a time-map of Othello in translation into German over three centuries. The Othello map plots the location of the translations and associates map points with dates, but the part that is interesting for us is how they are comparing texts: their method of segmenting the material: they are "chunking" the text in a sense-for-sense way, I think, but also using a segmenter tool to define the chunks. Their visuals of textual change across translations and over time are interesting and definitely relevant to our ideas for the long-range study of Amadis. Anyway, would you both read their project description when you can find some time (if you don't already know it)?

http://www.delightedbeauty.org/vvv/Home/Project#

They apply two measurements of what they call the "energy" of translation: Eddy and Viv. Eddy is how one translated segment compares to all the other translations of this segment in the same language. Viv indicates how the Eddy measure at one passage compares to all the other passages. To use their tools, you'd need a full corpus of digitized translated texts, so for us, all the versions of Amadis in English compared to each other. Of course they also compare to the original text in the other language, but I am not as clear on how they are approaching that: I think they are going speech-by-speech through the Shakespeare play. We have moved by clause units, which is a similar decision.

HelenaSabel commented 7 years ago

Thank you for pointing out this reference, Elisa: I wasn’t familiar with this project. I only had time to skim over the website, but it was already a very neat presentation. I’ll write more after reading it more carefully.