Students of Case 1 were enrolled in intermediate and upper level courses in historical languages, mainly Ancient Greek or Latin. They performed two tasks:

1. Pairwise alignment between the source text and one chosen translation in a modern language.
2. Alignment of the source text against two different translations.

The purpose of the first exercise was to set the groundwork for a structural analysis of the most important morphosyntactic and semantic devices of the source language, comparing how those features were rendered in a different language (often English), of which the students had complete mastery. In the second exercise, they built upon this experience to draw an evaluation of two competing translations, focusing on the different ways in which complex linguistic phenomena can be rendered in another language.

The typical case for trilingual alignment was a student who was proficient in two languages, and wished to improve a third one. The student would perform a trilingual alignment (possibly preceded by a pairwise alignment between the two better-known languages), systematically comparing a lesser-known language against two translations. The student would use the knowledge of the first two languages to leverage the obstacles in understanding the third one, by recognizing common syntactical patterns, morphologies, or similarities in vocabulary.

Interestingly, this case was not limited to the study of historical languages: a collateral advantage of trilingual alignment was that students with proficiency in a historical language could use this opportunity to focus on another language that they knew less, often a second modern language that they were studying at the same time.

The third case involved students, enrolled in courses on culture or literature, who had no prior knowledge of the source language and were also not studying it. The students were given short sections of a source text and corresponding translations in various languages, and performed several tasks aimed at gradually building a critical approach to the original:

1. Individuate single words in the source text, such as “holy”, “honor”, or “love”, and align them with the corresponding words in a translation in a chosen language. The goal of this exercise was to develop an understanding of the depth of crucial cultural concepts, by assessing the many different ways in which the same word in the source text could be translated.
2. Compare how specific expressions were rendered in two translations, and then align them against the source text.[15] The students focused on different ways of conveying morphosyntactic constructs across languages, critically approaching different translation strategies.
3. Complete bilingual or trilingual alignment of a short passage, with intensive and systematic analysis of the linguistic and expressive content. The purpose of this exercise was to let students assess the linguistic differences between the languages in question, and partly to demonstrate to them that they could, in fact, approach a text in a language that they did not know at all, by means of translation alignment.

Interestingly, we observed that students who had mastery of more than one language almost immediately learned to use trilingual alignment to leverage the difficulties in dealing with a language that they had never seen before. This strategy proved effective in various cases: many students completed the first two assignments using both English and a third modern language (often Spanish or French); non-native English speakers used their native language to better understand complex words and expressions; students who mastered another classical language tested if they could use it to better engage with phenomena like inflected forms, participial uses, and subordination. Overall, trilingual alignment proved to be an effective strategy to engage with the source text, as already assessed in Case 2. By the end of the course, students were able to align relatively long passages against one or more translations.

At the end of the course all the students, no matter what level of mastery they had of the languages, developed an acute sense of how limited their understanding of the source text was from the translation, as much as the critical recognition that they could convey in-depth knowledge of critical cultural concepts expressed in the source language, by contrasting them with their modern language translation and investigating into their various meanings [Crane 2019]. The recognition of the limited capabilities of translation to efficiently convey concepts in Classical languages, while at first caused disappointment and criticism, convinced the students of the need to look more in depth into the original language to understand its inherent characteristics and the way it expressed ideas [Palladino 2020].

Students of the source language developed a tangible sense for the fluidity of translation by evaluating different strategies employed by professional scholars to approach complex phenomena; they systematically approached complex morphosyntactic constructs and were compelled to discuss their function and significance, while assessing the necessary imperfect character of any translation of them. In addition, students who were experimenting with learning a new modern language could approach unknown expressions and vocabulary by using their skills in other languages as a bridge to convey similar constructs.

One of the most relevant outcomes of this study was that students with no prior knowledge of the source language could start learning it by directly reading original literary texts. This approach could be revolutionary in the field of slow reading and language learning, and it also promises non-trivial consequences for passive users: readers with no knowledge of a source language could easily use already available alignments to perform a dynamic reading of the original aligned with its translation, gaining a basic understanding of vocabulary and syntax in the original.

We hope to have shown the pedagogical potential of translation alignment. However, we are also aware that significant implementation needs to be pursued to improve some underdeveloped aspects and to allow a more systematic use of a translation alignment interface in teaching practices.

We recognize that at the moment the tool is open to every category of user, and the aligned pairs are partly the result of unsupervised work, which may affect the quality and consistency of the information collected in the database. The lack of a suitable evaluation/correction workflow not only makes the dataset not accurate enough for machine translation, but also prevents organic teacher supervision. Therefore, the integration of a voting system for the evaluation of the accuracy by teachers or expert users is one of the most needed implementations. A related problem is the current impossibility of working on collaborative projects, where multiple users can work together on the same corpus.

Secondly, not all translation pairs are equally useful as training data. We should expect alignment to produce conflicting, mutually exclusive, results: after all, translation alignment is the result of interpretation, and not all cases are easily classifiable as “right” or “wrong”. In some cases, typically literary texts, it is extremely difficult to establish perfect or even partial correspondences between expressions and concepts in potentially very different languages: we have found that, in lack of specific guidelines or gold standards for each single language pair, users tend to create their own set of rules to keep a consistent alignment strategy, but these rules tend to be very different according to the particular purpose of the alignment. Therefore, we need a system to filter translation pairs: an option would be to allow users to classify different kinds of translation pairs, for example distinguishing categories such as “perfect/complete” or “partial/incomplete”, and “literal” or “free/poetical”.

Finally, we recognize that immediate access to part-of-speech tagging and available word pairs while performing the alignment would enormously impact on the work of non-specialized users and students, and obviously on the improvement of analytical passive reading. This very desirable additional feature is also included in our future implementation.