Project Update 02/07

[enb34]

This week our group specified our research question. We also marked up and developed a schema for the English version of Alice based on the structure of the document. We unfortunately ran into a problem with committing and pushing these documents to GitHub, which has thus far prevented us from uploading these modified versions to the project.

In the next week, we will be marking up a Japanese translation of the text. We will also be working on a more thorough analysis of the English text, as well as determining the specific kinds of nonsense words, rhymes, and puns that we will be looking for across both versions of the text, and how we will be categorizing these.

[Idi0teque]

That's a shame! What was the problem? I'd like to know just in case it ends up affecting us as well, and to know whether or not you resolved it successfully. Are you marking up the Japanese text in Kanji or just Hiragana, and if the former, how are you going to be able to capture alternate meanings of the same character in different contexts?

[brucknerp]

Agree with @Idi0teque above, please let us know what the specific issue was so we can reference it in the future!

I'm really interested in how you are going to create comparisons between the languages. If it's literally rhyming, I'm wondering how that works in Japanese since it's not as prevalent a process as it is in English.

Also, I'm sure you are already aware, but looking just a bit at your xml and plain text markup it seems there are some small things to clean up in regards to some over-tagging (like asterisk text breaks tagged as paragraphs). Maybe you just haven't uploaded the newer versions of these files, but it's still a good reminder for all of us to keep checking for these things.

[mtm80]

What is the exact focus of the research? Are you looking at the text on a mechanical level for things like rhyme and other techniques or changes of meaning?

[gabikeane]

@enb34 if you're still having problems with Git, please make a post in dh_course. If you have already resolved it, please let us know how you did it !

[enb34]

@mtm80 The focus of our research is on the linguistical differences across languages that arise from translating a text like Alice, which is full of puns, nonsense words, and rhymes. Because so many of these devices don't have direct equivalents in other languages, translations often have to strike a balance between being "true to the story" with literal translations and replacing the original with something that will be relevant for the intended audience (for example, replacing a common English children's song with a common Japanese children's song). In this sense, we'll be focusing on how the translator of the text chose to convey these in the edition of the Japanese version of the text that we're examining.

@brucknerp As far as rhyming specifically, the focus will be more focused on how the translator handled translating the English version of the rhyme into Japanese--did he go for a literal translation, did he pick a Japanese children's song to replace the rhyme, etc. Personally, especially after a brief scan of the Japanese text (we're working mostly with the English version right now), I don't anticipate finding a lot of rhyme itself in the Japanese text. Thank you also for pointing out the errors in the .txt and .xml files; I think I've fixed most of them, but I'm still experiencing difficulties with committing files, so they haven't been updated since I've made the changes.

@Idi0teque The edition of the text that we've chosen does use kanji, but because it is a children's book, there may be instances of kanji being omitted on certain words. In my precursory look at the text, I haven't noticed any examples of the words being represented by kanji in one place but hiragana in another, but this was a pretty basic skim. If I were to notice any, I might create a tag for words represented differently in different places, with a number or letter code as an attribute to specify the word/meaning. That being said, it may be interesting to note, but currently the focus of the research isn't on the characters themselves. If we notice that these characters are lending themselves to nonsense words or other interesting translation patterns that we're tracking, we may reconsider them as part of our question.

@gabikeane (and everyone else who's concerned about the GitBash issue) I've just created an issue in the course GitHub detailing the problem. I'm fairly certain that my problems arose from user error, and could have been prevented if I hadn't made a typo (and panicked) when committing the file.

Thanks for all your questions and comments!