Yuri Bizzoni studied Classical Philology during his Bachelor programme and Computational Linguistics for his Master's. He worked on tools for literary translation alignment and diachronic translation analysis, particularly on Homeric translations in Italian and French. Yuri is currently a CLASP PhD student. His research focuses on figurative language detection and interpretation in NLP, from a probabilistic angle.
Marianne Reboul is a PhD candidate in France in Comparative Literature, currently working in Digital Humanities at the Sorbonne. She has a Masters Degree and Agrégation in Classics, and is a self-taught programmer in several languages, such as Java and Python. Her Master's thesis was a dynamic digitized translation and explanation of the IXth book of Homer’s Odyssey, and her PhD is entitled «Automatic comparison of French translations of Homer’s Odyssey, from 1541 to 2008»
Angelo Mario Del Grosso is a computer engineer with a Ph.D. in information engineering. He obtained his degree in 2015 with a thesis entitled “Designing a library of Component for Textual Scholarship” from the University of Pisa. Since 2010, he has been working as a research fellow at the Institute of Computational Linguistics “A. Zampolli” of CNR (ILC-CNR). He has been involved in a number of different national and international Digital Humanities projects. His main research interests encompass: Object-Oriented approaches for modeling Abstract Data Types characterizing, in general, the DH domain and, in particular, the requirements of textual scholarship; Analysis, design and development of software components for linguistic and philological applications to process textual resources of ancient texts, medieval tradition, printed tradition, and to handle modern and contemporary authors.
This is the source
In this paper we intend to present a tool we developed for translation studies and diachronically compare various French translations of the
This field of study is part of the more general Classical Receptions
studies that try to analyse the influence and adaptation of classical texts in
modern and contemporary literature, theatre, cinema, and many other artistic
fields. While Greek texts have been analysed by scholars for more than two
thousand years, research about classical translations is not yet a most renown
subject. In recent years this theme has raised a growing interest in the
academic community.
We developed a program that can align textual sequences (defined as groups of
words delimited by a specified grammatical pivot, in our case proper nouns),
without need of previous training. We obtained alignments for many different
kinds of translations
Thanks to the alignments obtained using the program, we can explore translations in a number of ways. We will illustrate the creation of a graphical interface to visualize French Homeric translations.
With our tool, it is possible to highlight aligned portions of texts and show their immediate differences or similarities, both in meaning and in syntactic distribution.
We will show some resulting syntactic analyses carried out on a small sample of texts, taken from a corpus of twenty-seven unabridged French translations of the Odyssey and explore how the study of diachronic translations through algorithms of computational linguistics can produce interesting results for literary and linguistic studies.
Presenting a tool developed for translation studies
The
This paper focuses on the XIth book. This book is a very well known episode of the
Concerning the Greek pivot text, it is based on the Greek text established by
Allen and Monro
To analyse trends or literary tendencies, the use of alignment and
post-processing algorithms appeared as a novelty. Many works already have been
made on aligning translations to their original texts (see for example
Since segment alignment is widely considered a necessary step in order to proceed
toward any kind of word alignment attempt
To align our translations to the original text we wrote a Java implementation of
the Needleman-Wunsch algorithm
There have been several attempts to adapt the Needleman-Wunsch algorithm for use
in the field of text processing and digital humanities. To cite some of the most
recent cases, it has been used to perform phonetic alignments in historical
linguistics (see
In our case, we re-purposed the Needleman-Wunsch structure to align bilingual portions of text. Through the process described in the following pages we globally aligned the XIth book of the
Although applying this algorithm to non-biological sequences is not a novelty, to the best of our knowledge there has been no previous application of the Needleman-Wunsch algorithm to translation alignment and diachronic translation study.
Simply put, the Needleman-Wunsch algorithm tries to align two sequences of comparable length. Given that each sequence is divided into an arbitrary number of elements, such as words or letters for a sentence, the task of the algorithm is to optimally match the elements of the two sequences.
To perform this operation the algorithm records each possible match between the elements of the two sequences in a grid-like structure, and assigns a score to each combination. This score is usually computed through a matching rule: for example, two identical words are a better match than two totally different words. The cost of leaving a gap if the system doesn’t find any good matches for a sequence’s element is also taken into consideration. Once this grid is built and filled with scores, the algorithm is able to trace back the optimal (e.g. least expensive) path through it, as can be seen in Figure 1.
An ideal
path would be a perfect diagonal, and the algorithm tries to
diverge the least from such a path, given the differences between the sequences
and the similarity heuristics it uses. This process results in the optimal
global alignment of the sequences.
Figure 2 shows an example of global alignment of two strings performed through
the Needleman-Wunsch. If an element could not be aligned, the algorithm will
insert a
Since we study translations of comparable length, this approach seems reasonable. As we will detail later, we pass to the algorithm our texts divided in small blocks and we provide it with an ad hoc similarity function. We perform the alignment twice, so that we are able to refine the similarity function for the second alignment through the results of the first alignment. The result is a sequence of small, aligned blocks in one or two languages that can be used as a basis for in-depth quantitative analysis of translation corpora.
In our case, the main problem was the necessity to align long and non-segmented texts with translations that are often noisy, literary and inaccurate. Furthermore, Homeric poems are not divided on a small scale: rhapsodies are hundreds of lines long and episodes can be undetermined.
There is a variety of elements that can be used as anchors in a text. The best anchors are high frequency words, when the original and its translation are very similar; or low frequency words such as technical terms, if we are sure they will always be translated in the same way or within a very reduced number of variants. Numbers can also act as anchors if they are always translated in the same way.
However, in the case of Homeric translations, these pivots are not reliable. We can find many kinds translations of the Homeric text, with many types of periphrasis, interpolation, and stylistic compromises. For example, many translators thought that repetition was a reprehensible stylistic feature and consistently used synonyms or periphrases where the original text had simply the same word repeated twice: so high frequency nouns or verbs could be unreliable. Other translators could do just the opposite, making low frequency words unreliable.
These variations in translation style made choosing appropriate anchors
problematic as traditional approaches were difficult to apply (for more
traditional approaches see
Also, we didn’t have a training dataset
, as often happens in other cases
of translation alignment, since there was no existing corpus of aligned Homeric
Greek - French texts. Even if such a corpus existed, it would have been
unreliable due to the compromises that different authors made while translating
the text. Additionally, as this is a diachronic study on literary translations,
even a Greek - French dictionary of anchor pairs would have hardly been useful.
For these reasons, in order to segment our texts and their different translations we chose to use proper nouns as anchor words. Proper nouns are a relatively stable feature in Homeric translations. In fact, even the translations which differ most from the original text tend to maintain the Greek proper nouns. It is possible to look through many different translations and find that proper nouns tend to remain phonetically similar with their Greek source, as can be seen in Figure 3.
We decided to use proper nouns as pivot for segmenting our text. A source sequence is defined as a list of words beginning with a Greek proper noun stopping at index-1, index being the location of the following Greek proper noun; a target sequence is a list of words beginning with a French (or any target language) proper noun, stopping at index-1. However, proper nouns are not completely reliable: duplications, interpolations, substitutions or unusual translations happen in the onomastic field too. As a result rare proper nouns tend to be more reliable pivots while frequent proper nouns should not be given the same importance for the alignment. Once the sequences have been defined, the alignment can begin.
We first create a dictionary of anchor words. The Greek nouns are transformed
according to historical linguistic rules that produced French modern proper
nouns from their source Greek ones. For example, in <String, String []>
is therefore created, with a key for
the source text and a list of translations for the target texts. The dictionary
is cumulative and allows to add every possible value of every possible target
text to a single source key. A possible representation of this map could be:
This dictionary will allow us to increase or decrease the potential similarity between two sequences. The alignment process can now begin.
As we briefly explained at the beginning of the paper, the first step is to
create a 2D matrix where all the sequences are stored: the source sequences are
stored in the columns (each sequence is stored in each column), the target
sequences are stored in the lines (each sequence is stored in a different line).
To align the elements of the series, it will be necessary to choose a scoring
system. A basic scoring system can be thus summed up: if a source element at
index
Our way of establishing scores between sequences is similar, but more selective.
We use many similarity metrics already well known that we implemented for our
own purposes, such as the Monge Elkan distance, the Levensthein distance, the
Jaro-Winkler distance, or the Hamming distance
When this process is done, we have a list of aligned chunks, with gaps when the
Needleman-Wunsch found no possible alignment, as in the example in Figure 4. The
chunk
Three post-processing steps are then performed. First, we remove all the gaps from the source text. For example, if at the same index both the source sequence and the target sequence are gap characters, the index of both lists is removed. If the source sequence is a gap while the target one is not, the source sequence is removed. The target sequence is then associated with either the previous or the next sequence in the source text, based on which of these contains a potential match for the proper noun in the target sequence
Once this first alignment and rearrangement is done, we proceed to yet another alignment, this time taking into account the similarity between sequences deduced from our distributional semantics method.
This step is performed through a small variation of a standard distributional semantics model. The distribution of words in the text (both original and translation) is modelled into a vector representing how many times a given word occurs in each aligned original-translation block. In this way, the contextual information which is usually taken into account in semantic spaces is removed and the co-occurrence of bilingual couples in the aligned blocks emerges with clarity. A French word and a Greek word occurring in the same sequence of aligned blocks will have similar vectors. Through this method we manage to automatically retrieve a small dictionary of word-translation pairs. Naturally, the length of this dictionary is modifiable changing the similarity threshold above which two elements are considered a word-translation pair. If the first alignment was very noisy (for example with many gap and large blocks) we will need a higher threshold to establish a meaningful correspondence, while a cleaner first alignment will allow us to relax our acceptability constraints. It also becomes evident if a text tends to use always the same translation for the same set of words, or if it translates them differently in different contexts.
To this distributional dictionary, we add a specific MGiza dictionary. Once the
alignment of the corpus has been done, we use a wordtoword aligner called
MGiza++, the most recent version of Giza++. As it is multithreaded, the program
is much quicker, uses less memory, and the training process is more supple and
modifiable. The word-to-word alignment is done in two steps: first the
production of a co-occurrence tab (with the pre-implemented sent2cooc
algorithm), and an alignment based on training models
(recursively
modifiable). MGiza++ uses IBM
The result is a series of aligned pairs like in Figure 5.
It is possible to refine textual blocks by recollecting the beginning and end of their opening and closing sentences. This final step creates meaningful blocks that start and end with complete sentences, although this procedure requires some precaution. Figure 6 shows an example of the alignment possibilities of the interface.
The program was originally conceived with a Java interface. The application was
designed to be a purely local tool. However, when the time came to show our
results to a wide variety of researchers, we soon found out we needed a web
interface, to address the needs of specialists in Digital Humanities and a wider
range of literary researchers.
Statistical comparison (number of occurrences of each term in the whole file, number of occurrences for this precise identification and its correspondents, etc.), phonetic comparison (phonetic similarities between source and target and between different targets) and syntactical comparison (proximity with Greek in the whole file, proximity with Greek for a precise identifier, etc.) allow us to have a clear overview of all the translations at once. The web interface we built for visualization allows us to visualize all the dynamically aligned text simultaneously. One of the features that still remains to be added to the web interface is a personal notebook for each user with the possibility of commenting on chosen aligned sequences and hyper-linking those commentaries to their specific identifiers.
In other words, the calculation capacity is not comparable to that of a human being. One would not be able to measure, for example, the exact syntactical proximity between the Greek text in regard to 50 different French translations at once. The fact that one is able to analyse multiple translations at once while focusing on extremely precise events in the texts also shows what the whole process of translation studies hints at, that one does not simply read Homer’s text, but only one singular aspect of it from a particular author.
Complete transparency of translation is not possible, and that is partly what our tool shows. Although many sequences may convey the same general meaning, the way each translator illustrates his perceptions in his own style shows the reader that the
We will show a set of results obtained using the method outlined above to analyse a segment of our corpus of translations of the
We first chose to compare Salomon Certon’s translation
The idea that a cultural regeneration is deeply related to linguistic
regeneration flourishes. That is to say that French poets tend to seek their
own style within Ancient Epics. The general idea is that the skillful
translator should not slavishly imitate the author’s genius, but enrich it
by giving it his own skill and language (
In this abstract we can see that the necessity of capturing Homer’s verses
causes an expansion of the text, leading to the presence of many hapaxes or
low frequency terms, that is to say words that are not present in any of the
other translations at this point of the text. For example, in
, the second line is an expansion and
cannot be justified by the Greek text. This suggests that Certon privileged
maintaining the metre over strict accuracy.
Comparing Certon’s translation with the others it is apparent that he
translates in alexandrins
, and tends to drastically develop the Greek
text (his is one of the longest texts in our corpus). The verb
simply disappears. The word
, literally
in black smoke
, becomes
(an enormous river and from the neck
a black liquid ran
), which is a clarification and an
amplification. Many of Certon’s connotations cannot be deduced from the
Greek text, such as souls
(flying
),
(empty
) (Christian heritage of the soul’s lightness). Death is
personified, which is quite far from the traditional pagan belief of the
souls’ peregrination. The tragic connotation is amplified. The
, like in Volterra’s Latin
translation
On the whole, we know very little about Achille de la Valterie. We know that
he was a
, but that he
renounced his vows later on. He is also known to have published a
translation of Juvenal’s and Perse’s
, from which we can deduce his way of translating. First, he states that there is no need to know about Homer’s life to translate Homer:épître
Quand on ne sait point toutes ces choses, on a du moins l’avantage de n’être point obligé de les oublier, après avoir perdu beaucoup de temps à les apprendre. When you do not know all these things, you have at least the advantage not to have to forget them, once you have lost so much time learning them
There is therefore no documentary value in Homer’s epics. And although he
states that strict proximity to the Greek text is one of his
goals
, All those who know
Greek can bear witness that I exactly copied the original, and
that I am convinced that what made my work beautiful was that I
religiously preserved all its aspects, and that I expressed them
with perfect accuracy.
To avoid (...)
some reluctance possibly found in our delicate times while
reading this translation, I approximately followed the
Ancients’ customs. I did not dare show Achilles, Patroclus
and Ulysses in the kitchen, and say all the things the Poet
cared to show. I used general words, more appropriate in our
language than those many details.
La Valterie has no real philological ambition. Indeed, from what we can get
studying his translations, La Valterie is an extremely poor Hellenist (it is
almost doubtful that he read any Greek at all) and mainly translated from
Latin, but also from existing translations (this is quite visible in our
program when you compare La Valterie’s translation
Our program does help us to see immediately that La Valterie’s translation is
extremely far from the original text, and even contradictory with its
supposed source. A frequency study shows that the whole (or at least the
majority) of La Valterie’s translation is sewed with hapaxes (it is both far
from the Greek text and never used in any of the French translations), which
made it the most difficult text to align. We can also see that, although
most translators tend to reproduce important syntactic marks in Greek (full
stops, etc), La Valterie’s translation is the only one with no resemblance
whatsoever to the Greek syntax. This is visible in our example. Sentences
are long, there are frequent clarifications, tangible modalisations, and, of
course, many mistakes. It is also clear in this example that La Valterie
tends to avoid what he considers as trivial words and expressions, which
need to be either modernized or deleted. The word
may be justified (though it erases the
polysemic
and
, both
supplications and liturgical prayers),
(grieving about the harshness of old age
) is a complex manner of
defining a much simpler down to earth single word in Greek,
(then again this whole
expression is an hapax, as no other translator will bother to be so
disdainful of a simple practical term). The word
is a condensation of war heroes adapted to
the 17th century.
Therefore, La Valterie’s translation is both very far from being accurate or even faithful to the Greek. In later critical essays on Homeric translations, especially in Madame Dacier’s work, which is discussed below, La Valterie is seen as someone who has been left behind by the progress of translation. His translation has been edited, reprinted, but there are still no serious critics who say anything positive about it, quite the opposite in fact. A few years late, La Valterie becomes the paragon of a moralist translator; fit to feebly teach some moral values, but clearly unfit to reveal Homer’s beauty. From the 17th century onward, practising translation as a mere imitation is no longer an unquestionable principle.
Figures 9 and 10 show an alignment around La Valterie’s text and a small part of the same text tokenized in blocks in the interface.
Madame Dacier’s note on this part:
The first turning point in contrast with this tendency seems to appear with
Madame Dacier’s translations (from what we gathered from the program,
studying the texts diachronically). Anne Lefebvre Dacier (known as Madame
Dacier
), wrote her translations as a reaction to Homeric imitations.
Many translators had followed the same principles as La Vallterie for at
least a century. The
up-to-dateversion. In this general atmosphere, Madame Dacier is an exception. She was very fond of Greek and Latin from a very young age, and was given the chance to grow up with just as much education as a man thanks to her father. Though small and, above all, a woman, her strong character and her excellent knowledge of Greek forced her peers to acknowledge the quality of her many publications
Je n’écris pas pour les savants qui lisent Homère en sa langue (...) j’écris pour ceux qui ne le connaissent point, c’est à dire pour le plus grand nombre, à l’égard desquels ce poète est comme mort.
Although she states that her work is not made to be a philological
translation, it is clear that the amount of research and stylistic work in
her translations is enormous
Dacier uses common terms for the society she lives in, uses simplified
syntax, and above all annotates her text enormously. We included the notes
and explanations directly in the text but did not align them. What is most
visible in this abstract is that Dacier tends to respect the length and
syntax of the Greek text, much more than her predecessors. It is also
visible that she initiates this tendency for the following translators such
as Bitaubé (for more details on syntactic proximity after Madame Dacier, see
our website). She erases the polysemy of the Greek word
, interpreting it in a
logical and clarified way (leaving aside both the smoky effect and its
blackness). She just translates the expression
by
, erasing the redundancy like the dead
that have lived
. Dacier definitely wants to imitate the Greek
syntax, keeping the paratactic
:
this is quite visible in the important similarity to the Greek throughout
the text (see greyer colums). She also chooses to clarify the polysemous
word
, with the images of
both sorrow and flowers. She adapts the deity Ares into Mars who would be
more familiar to her audience, and she is one of the rare translators (along
with Bitaubé) to use this adaptation. We decided to add the footnote we
included, as it shows Dacier’s desire to explain the war heroes’ death in
terms of Christian beliefs. There is no phonetic proximity to the Greek
whatsoever. She does not simply want to imitate Homer but to make him
understandable for her readers and so phonetic imitation, which is seen
later in Leconte de Lisle, would be counter-productive. It is also
noticeable that this abstract contains a large amount of green words, while
earlier translations do not.This means that many of the words she uses were
then imitated and reproduced by her followers. From the imitative flowery
pomp we got from the previous century, we now get a form of puritanism from
this erudite translator.
Figures 11 and 12 show an alignment around Dacier’s text and a small part of the same text tokenized in blocks in the interface.
Bitaubé’s works show similar tendencies as Dacier’s. Bitaubé’s native language was German. When he decided to learn French, he saw it as a scholarly language, a language that tends towards excellence. Thanks to his first publication of the
(prose cadencée
prose in rythm):
Il n’est pas aisé d’écrire dans une prose cadencée, harmonieuse, qui s’élève (elle le peut), au ton de la poésie ; et je soutiens que la gêne d’une grande fidélité, lorsqu’on s’y assujettit scrupuleusement, n’est pas si éloignée qu’on le pense de celle de traduire en vers. It is not easy to write in prose with rhythm, harmony and worthy (it can be) of poetry ; and I am sure that the uneasiness due to scrupulous accuracy is not as far as we might think from the difficulty of writing poetry
To assert this scientific ambition, Bitaubé is one of the first to
explicitly mention any translator before him. What is more, not only does
Bitaubé want to be exact in the meaning, he also aims at accuracy
concerning style, imitating, as much as possible, Homer’s
and
, Bitaubé
chooses juxtaposition, maintaining the Greek hypotyposis. The blackness and
the liquid aspect of the
is now explicit (
). Bitaubé also attempts, as much
as possible, to reproduce the Greek redundancy
. Finally, he strictly imitates
the Greek syntax, maintaining the paratactic syntax and the adjectives
describing the dead.
After Bitaubé, the 19th century flourishes with many translations of Homer’s epics. The French Revolution, and especially the Terror has given a new gleam to the ancient poets, supposed to be the witnesses of a higher moral value, lost in modern times, both aesthetically and politically. Bitaubé is in an in-between conception of the Greek literature as the
Il s’applique à conserver la marche et les formes de la phrase grecque, il imite assez bien l’abondance et la rondeur de l’original, et sa traduction a un air antique, et ne manque pas d’un certain charme ; mais l’audace, la majesté, l’éloquence variée d’Homère, la richesse de ses couleurs, le mouvement rapide de son style, la hardiesse et l’impétuosité du langage, on les cherche en vain ; on lui demanderait plus vainement encore la mollesse et la grâce, l’harmonie générale du style homérique, les expressions touchantes, cette mélodie suave He is intent on keeping the Greek movement and syntax, he fairly well imitates the abundance and roundness of the original text, and his translation seems antique, somehow charming; but for Homer’s boldness, majesty and various eloquence, for his rich colours, his audacious and daring language, you may look in vain. One might even less ask him for gentleness and gracefulness, the general harmony of Homer’s style, his touching expressions, his smooth melody.
A major evolution can be noticed here; a greater attention is given to Homer’s style rather than moral teachings, and Bitaubé, although frequently reprinted at the time, especially in school books, is not criticized for the possible rashness of his translation, but on the contrary for his lack of Homeric style.
Figures 13 and 14 show an alignment around Bitaubé’s text and a small part of the same text tokenized in blocks in the interface.
The thermidorian reaction to this way of perceiving the Classics puts to an
end the cult of a lost Antique virtue. Volney, for example, will say: Those classics, that
we praised so much, those poets, those orators, those
historians, all of those, indiscriminately given to the
youth, nourrished her of their principles and feelings. We
all forgot that this so-called republic, variable during
different eras, was always an oligarchy, made of the
noblemen and the church, exclusive masters of lands and
works, and of a crowd of common people weighed down by
debts, not even posessing four acres each, only differing
from their own slaves by the right to punish them, sell
them, sell their vote, and grow old and die under the
Centurions’ flags, as camp slaves used to pillaging
soldiers.
As a result of this violent reaction, the Greek will again be given to the youth of the time, but not as a moral model, but much more as a potential source of erudition and scientific knowledge. Le Prince Lebrun is one of the heirs of such teachings.
Le Prince Lebrun is, above all, a
In our text, we can see that he tends to strictly imitate the Greek, often in a clumsy way, and sometimes with great inaccuracy. This entire translation has no footnotes, no preface, no post-face. He has none of Dacier’s or Bitaubé’s ethnographic care, although it is clear that he has read Bitaubé, as we can see from our program, as he reuses many words that had previously only be used by Bitaubé. This translation is the direct result of the educative principles initiated by Dacier and Bitaubé.
Lebrun’s translation is an echo of the way Greek was taught at the time. Indeed, an enormous amount of partial scholarly translations appear during the second half of the 19th century that clearly tend to privilege the strict accuracy to the Greek text, without the help of Latin. The Greek Classics have become a source of linguistic benefits (the necessity to learn Greek at the time is often justified by the ability it should give to students to enhance their intellectual capabilities as well as their analytic skills, reasoning, and logic) and ethnological information (the Greek text should be perceived as a literary testimony).
Figures 15 and 16 show an alignment around Lebrun’s text and a small part of the same text tokenized in blocks in the interface.
From the second half of the 19th century, many juxtalinear translations are published. For the first time, the aim is to publish a large amount of abridged translations, and if a certain abstract has more success than others, publish the entire translation. These translations are typographically recognizable; the first page is a word-to-word translation, unreadable and not supposed to be fluent, and the second page is a linguistically acceptable translation. This practical use of translation reveals two essential points in the evolution of translation practices. Firstly, in order for a translation to be judged adequate, it must show that the translator perfectly understood the syntactic problems of the Greek text and secondly, that Greek and Latin studies have never been more important in general education.
However, Sommer’s many translations
is simply translated by
). What is more, Sommer tends to
maintain Greek temporality: he keeps aorists and imperfects, not considering
French habits (
,
the pale dread was getting
to me
). Sommer’s translation is clearly and without any doubt
the nearest text to the Greek syntax. The syntactic similarities are at
their highest points throughout the text. What is more, the text displays an
enormous amount of green and blue words, that is to say extremely frequent
words. He does not aim at originality, but at reproducing the meaning word
by word. Finally he is one of the rare 19th century translators (along with
Leconte de Lisle) who share such a close proximity to the Greek at this
precise point.
Both Latin and Greek Classics seem at this time to have regained a certain prestige. Many of the abridged translations are made for school use, and their notes and parallel analysis show a new grammatical perception of both languages. Almost paradoxically, the extreme accuracy asked for from the students will sometimes generate much bolder translations such as Leconte de Lisle’s.
Figures 17 and 18 show an alignment around Sommer’s text and a small part of the same text tokenized in blocks in the interface.
In this period translators stop adapting the text to their own language and
culture, but enrich their own style with the contact of strangeness. The
climax of this tendency seems to be reached with Leconte de Lisle
, Chouraqui [...] does
nothing new, but like Leconte de Lisle with names in Homer, he
(the dead that are no
more
). The
. The following sentence exactly
maintains the Greek syntax (nominative juxtapositions, demonstrative pronoun
). But what is more,
Leconte de Lisle maintains, as much as possible, every assonance and
alliteration present in the Greek text (
, with three and two syllables:
, with three and two
syllables). Even the books themselves are not books anymore but
rhapsodies
. This tendency illustrated by Leconte de Lisle is
clearly seen at the time as an emancipation. Translating means working not
only on a source language, but on French itself. The fact that a new kind of
French is needed is visible in the way translators deliberately skew common
meanings and usage. Translation is not perceived only as a symbolic means of
understanding ideas and culture, but also as a new way to express impression
and sound. Translation itself is a new work of art.
However popular Greek studies might have been during the second half of the 19th century, their descent is quite tangible throughout the 20th, and so is a drop in interest for literary Greek translation, especially in the first twenty years of the century. This descent goes hand in hand with the increasing specialization of scientific and documentary matter. Knowing Greek means more and more that one should be familiar with a precise contextualized Greek reality and history. The study of Greek becomes the study of Greek history and archaeological value, not so much as purely developing a stylistic and grammatical ability.
Figures 19 and 20 show an alignment around Leconte de Lisle’s text and a small part of the same text tokenized in blocks in the interface.
Victor Bérard considered Homer’s
complexe de Victor Bérard
is translated byκελαινεφές
which is the shortest and yet the most literal translation we have. The same thing can be noticed about the wordles sombres vapeurs
, erased from so many translations before, literally maintained without awkwardness, byθύμος
(portant au coeur
bearing in their heart). Let us also notice that the dread does not have a clarity, but a color, a characteristic that he will be the first one to use, and the nearest to the Greek so far. What is more, Bérard is the first since Certon to fully express Odysseus’ fear with the hypotyposis present throughout the description of the dead, and keeping the paratactic asyndeton. We can notice a true evolution with Bérard’s translation, initiated, we may suppose, by Leconte de Lisle. The strangeness of Greek must be assumed both as a philologic information for the Hellenist and an aesthetic novelty for the poet. We can therefore also see Bérard, apart from Leconte de Lisle, as one of the first to assume fully Greek proper nouns, many of which are in italics. We can also see that his translation, still one of the most well known in France today, has been reused and changed (in very different ways), both by Philippe Jaccottet and Frédéric Mugler. Indeed, Frédéric Mugler is often seen to reuse Bérard’s translations without citing him, which we can see in our program as he uses expressions that have a very low frequency and that are only present in Bérard’s translation. For example, just like in Bérard, the invocation is made to the
, the animal’s throat ispeuple des défunts
(just as in, and only in, Bérard and Jaccottet), the old men aretranchée
, and finally the dread is described with exactly the same words,chargés d’épreuves
. Concerning Jaccottet, it seems to be a quite different matter, as he is the first, after Bérard, to use French verses to translate the Greek epics.je verdissais de crainte
Figures 21 and 22 show an alignment around Bérard’s text and a small part of the same text tokenized in blocks in the interface.
We chose to analyze Jaccottet’s translation here
(both accurate
and
faithful
). From a translator’s point of view, this first means
that there is a promise of truth between the word and the object it
represents, but also between a foreign word and a familiar word. As
Jaccottet states himself: One should be able
to hear at least the feeble echo of the admirable original
music, and we should translate, as far as it is possible,
and without absurdity, according to the letter itself (...)
the text should find its necessary slowness, something of a
resonance
Both Bérard and Jaccottet, though to different extents, embody this
increasing attention to the poetics of their source material and the need to
reproduce an echo of what has been lost. In our text, we can first notice a
symmetric inversion of the syntactic order, emphasizing the liturgical
aspect of the scene and the Homeric tendency to maintain the hesitation
between the narrative and the incantation. The expression
(the two
beasts
), most unusual, may be due less to the context than to
the phonic imitation of
is almost shocking, but
then again reflects the phonic imitation of
is translated with apparent ease,
both keeping the pleonasm and the naturalness of the language, with
(the
souls of the departed dead
). The adjective
(strange
) maintains
Odysseus’ uneasy feeling (implied by
), and while Jaccottet maintains the final
imperfect (also visible in the Greek text), he gives it an inchoative
connotation, which is most original. Finally, let us point out that there
are no capitals in Jaccottet’s poetry, corresponding both to his own
principle of
(disappearance
) and to a vision of poetic rhythm (conceived as a
blow, a wind, which should not be stopped).
Here we showed a larger sample of Jaccottet’s abstract, as a smaller sample, similar to ones used for other translations, would not have highlighted Jaccottet’s exceptional attention to accurately recreating the Greek. As we saw, he tends to reproduce as many phonemes as he can, and many of his proper nouns, but also many inner words, are in italics, and he has an exceptional high similarity with the Greek syntax, comparable only to Sommer’s.
Both Bérard and Jaccottet, following the path Leconte de Lisle had
initiated, have contributed to a new perception of translation, as a
masterpiece both in debt and independent from its source. We would like to
conclude this analysis of Jaccottet’s work with one of his own elegant
statements about translation in his preface: And such has been
the utopic dream of this translation, faulty like any
translation: to make the text come to the reader, or better
perhaps, to his listener just like come to the traveler
these statues or these light columns in the crystalline air
of Greece, especially when they surprise him completely
unexpected; but even when expected, they surprise him, as
they come from far away to speak although just perceived.
They remain apart, but the distance from them to us is also
a radiant link.
Figures 23 and 24 show an alignment around Jaccottet’s text and a small part of the same text tokenized in blocks in the interface.
The program we made was extremely effective at analysing and identifying different trends and patterns in a range of French translations from the 16th to the 20th century. Thanks to our efforts in alignment and improvement of NLP tools within a single interface, we tried to give the common user access to potentially enriched literary analysis. This has only been a sample, but we hope to develop both our corpus (in different languages) and our tools in future months.
Translation studies, but other fields as well, would benefit from such a
quantitative and qualitative approach, as many researchers would not have to
rely on intuition or personal estimation of manual comparisons, but could have
access to actual quantitative and qualitative results and facts, that could not
be obtained otherwise. Here we gave an example of a possible diachronic
interpretation done with the help of such a tool. Many works on the history of
translation
In our analysis we tried to show that there is a tangible and possibly
explainable evolution in the way French translators saw and practised
translation from the 16th to the 20th century. At the beginning, when the
Homeric text was barely known and barely accessible in common language,
translation was more a matter of
The program discussed in this paper has a variety of applications depending on the interests of the researcher. These applications include analysing individual authorial style or analysing the style of individual translations; they also include comparing translations with the source text as well as comparing different translations. The analysis presented in this paper is focused on a short sample of the
If these results are interesting in one language, it would be even better to conduct research on diachronic translation corpora in different languages. Since the alignment program works for many European idioms, similar research would be possible using the same system. Aligning multilingual translations we could both compare the features of contemporary translators in different languages aligned to the original text and align different translators between themselves (for example, we could align Madame Dacier’s