Text Alignment

SunoikisisDC Digital Classics: Session 8

Date: Thursday March 13, 2025. 16:00-17:30 GMT.

Convenors: Megan Bushnell (Oxford Text Archive), Chiara Palladino (Furman University), Farnoosh Shamsian (University of Leipzig)

Youtube link: https://youtu.be/qpT-TgyqSVw

Slides: tba

Outline

This session introduces the topic of Text Alignment, particularly focusing on the use of alignment to explore unknown texts or languages. In the first part, we cover the general principles of Text Alignment as a manual and automatic task, and describe the related challenges in the establishment of cross-linguistic equivalences. Then, we give an overview of the Ugarit Project and Translation Alignment Editor, a tool to create word-based alignments of texts in different languages, and provide some examples of how TA has been used to explore ancient texts and their reception, in research, teaching, and in Machine Learning. In the second part of the session, we explore different ways in which alignment can support the exploration of unknown texts or languages: for example, by aligning equivalent text chunks, by studying how concepts or proper names are rendered in different languages, or by aligning and comparing three different translations.

Required readings

• de Pedro, R. (1999). The Translatability of Texts: A Historical Overview. Meta, XLIV, 4, 1999. Available: http://www3.uji.es/~aferna/EA0921/4a-Translatability.pdf
• G. Crane, A. Babeu, L.M. Cerrato, et al. Beyond translation: engaging with foreign languages in a digital library. Int J Digit Libr 24, 163–176 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00799-023-00349-2.
• Panou, D. (2013). “Equivalence in Translation Theories: A Critical Evaluation, Theory and Practice.” Language Studies 3.1, pp. 1-6. Available: http://www.academypublication.com/issues/past/tpls/vol03/01/01.pdf

Further readings

• Tariq Yousef, Chiara Palladino, and Farnoosh Shamsian. 2023. Classical Philology in the Time of AI: Exploring the Potential of Parallel Corpora in Ancient Language. In Proceedings of the Ancient Language Processing Workshop, pages 179–192, Varna, Bulgaria. INCOMA Ltd., Shoumen, Bulgaria.
• Palladino, C., Shamsian, F. & Yousef, T., (2022) “Using Parallel Corpora to Evaluate Translations of Ancient Greek Literary Texts. An Application of Text Alignment for Digital Philology Research”, Journal of Computational Literary Studies 1(1). Available: https://doi.org/10.48694/jcls.100
• Bushnell, M. (2021). "Reconstructing Gavin Douglas’s Translation Practice in the Eneados Using a Corpus Linguistic-Based Method", DHBenelux 3, pp. 1-25. Available: https://journal.dhbenelux.org/journal/issues/003/article-16-Bushnell.pdf.
• T. Yousef, C. Palladino, F. Shamsian, A. d’Orange Ferreira, M. Ferreira dos Reis (2022). "An automatic model and Gold Standard for translation alignment of Ancient Greek". Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2022), Marseille, 20-25 June, 5894–5905. URL: http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2022/pdf/2022.lrec-1.634.pdf
• C. Palladino, M. Foradi, T. Yousef (2021). "Translation alignment for Historical Language Learning. A case study." DHQ 15.3. Available: http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/15/3/000563/000563.html
• T. Yousef, Translation Alignment Applied to Classical Languages (2023). PhD Thesis, University of Leipzig. Available: http://dx.doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.15623.57764.

Resources

• Bibliotheca Augustana: https://www.hs-augsburg.de/~harsch/a_index.html#fr
• "Translation Alignment" in the Digital Classicist Wiki. https://wiki.digitalclassicist.org/Translation_alignment
• Ugarit iAligner

Exercise

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