A team at Swansea University has developed an online tool that allows researchers to compare multiple translations of Shakespeare at the same time to see how much they vary...
A team at Swansea University has developed an online tool that allows researchers to compare multiple translations of Shakespeare at the same time to see how much they vary.
The platform can be used for any text, but has been demonstrated with Act 1, Scene 3 of Shakespeare's Othello, where the eponymous hero gives a persuasive speech about his courtship of Desdemona to her disapproving father Brabantio and others. Users can compare the original base English text (Michael Neill's OUP edition) with any one of 37 different German editions, dating from 1766 to 2010 -- something that the team calls a "translation array".
The most intriguing tool is the "Eddy value" tool which allows you to select individual lines from the scene and compare them to the translations from the 37 different German editions (the aim is to add in further languages and additional scenes, but the project needs more funds to do this). Based on analysis of all of the translations, each of the individual line translations has been awarded a numerical value. The higher the Eddy value, the more distinctive the translation, i.e. the more it stands out from the crowd. The value is calculated using word frequencies in the whole set of translations.
Linguist Tom Cheesman, who heads up the project at Swansea University explains: "If you say 'deviation from a norm', it is misleading, conceptually and statistically. Translation doesn't work like that: people think there's a 'right version' and then various kinds of mistake. No: it's about differing interpretations, not about right and wrong."