Othello Arrayed in Translations: Version Variation Visualization Project News

[Cheesman T.]

Dear all,

 

Apologies for sending an impersonal email. It's to the many who have helped this project -- wittingly or not. With thanks.

 

"Explore Great Works with their World-wide Translations" -- the first "Translation Array" prototype is live online at www.delightedbeauty.org/vvvclosed (read-only). At the read-and-write site www.delightedbeauty.org/vvv, you can upload corpora and work on them. The login for both installations is: Guest  Guest2012

 

Our test corpus is Shakespeare's Othello, Act 1 Scene 3, with 32 German versions (1766-2010).

 

We'll present our work at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre, London, on September 11 -- all welcome: see ow.ly/cLIu5 -- and at the Leipzig eHumanities Seminar, Oct 24. Kevin Flanagan built the corpus store and segmentation/alignment tool. Stephan Thiel designed visual interfaces. Zhao Geng has developed further visual analysis tools, offline as yet: see ow.ly/cLJu6. AHRC is the main project funder. We hope this model will be interesting for research, education, and arts practice.

 

At '/vvvclosed' (or ow.ly/cLKDT), click the lower left image ('Interface study for Viv & Eddy values'). Click any speech to see all German versions, with Google's English back-translations. Versions can be arranged in order of distinctiveness ('Eddy' values). Varying coloration of the base text expresses the intensity of variation among versions ('Viv' values). Certain sub-speech segments have also been defined, e.g. "Here is the man, this Moor" or "I saw Othello's visage in his mind". (On ‘Eddy and Viv’, see ow.ly/cLJN1. We're still working on the maths... and everything.)

 

Feedback, questions, requests and offers are all welcome. Email me, or the team on: trans...@gmail.com or tweet @transarrays. We'll be delighted to hear from you.

 

Best regards for what's left of the summer,

Tom

 

 

 

Dr Tom Cheesman

Reader in German

College of Arts and Humanities

Swansea University

SA2 8PP

 

Institution: www.swansea.ac.uk/staff/academic/ArtsHumanities/cheesmant  

Shakespeare/Translation: www.delightedbeauty.org / www.delightedbeauty.org/vvvclosed