To say almost the same thing? A study on cross-linguistic variation in ancient texts and their translations

IF 0.7 3区文学 0 HUMANITIES, MULTIDISCIPLINARY

Digital Scholarship in the Humanities Pub Date : 2023-01-24 DOI:10.1093/llc/fqac086

Chiara Palladino, Tariq Yousef

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引用次数: 0

Abstract

Abstract This article presents a study of several parallel corpora of historical languages and their translations. The aligned corpora are the result of a large crowdsourcing project, named Ugarit, aimed at supporting translation alignment for ancient and historical languages: the study of the resulting translation pairs allows us to observe cross-linguistic dynamics in a range of languages, some of which have never been systematically aligned before. The corpora considered are divided into two distinct groups: English translations of ancient languages, including Greek, Latin, Persian, and Coptic; and translations of ancient Greek into other languages, including Latin, English, Georgian, Italian, and Persian. We evaluated different ratios of word matching across each language pair (one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-one, and many-to-many), and analyzed the resulting trends across the corpus. We propose some observations on how and why different types of alignment links are established in a given language pair, and what factors affect their creation beyond the control of the user: we propose two complementary hypotheses to explain the changes, one based on structural linguistic factors and the other based on cultural difference.

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说几乎相同的话?古代文本的跨语言变异及其翻译研究

摘要本文对几种历史语言的平行语料库及其翻译进行了研究。对齐的语料库是一个名为Ugarit的大型众包项目的结果，该项目旨在支持古代和历史语言的翻译对齐:对结果翻译对的研究使我们能够观察一系列语言的跨语言动态，其中一些语言以前从未系统地对齐过。所考虑的语料库分为两个不同的组:古代语言的英语翻译，包括希腊语，拉丁语，波斯语和科普特语;以及将古希腊语翻译成其他语言，包括拉丁语、英语、格鲁吉亚语、意大利语和波斯语。我们评估了每个语言对(一对一、一对多、多对一和多对多)中单词匹配的不同比例，并分析了整个语料库的结果趋势。我们提出了一些关于如何以及为什么在给定的语言对中建立不同类型的对齐链接的观察，以及哪些因素影响它们的创造超出了用户的控制:我们提出了两个互补的假设来解释这些变化，一个基于结构语言因素，另一个基于文化差异。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Digital Scholarship in the Humanities Multiple-

CiteScore

1.80

自引率

25.00%

发文量

期刊介绍： DSH or Digital Scholarship in the Humanities is an international, peer reviewed journal which publishes original contributions on all aspects of digital scholarship in the Humanities including, but not limited to, the field of what is currently called the Digital Humanities. Long and short papers report on theoretical, methodological, experimental, and applied research and include results of research projects, descriptions and evaluations of tools, techniques, and methodologies, and reports on work in progress. DSH also publishes reviews of books and resources. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities was previously known as Literary and Linguistic Computing.