Translation alignment: Herodotus in Greek, English and Arabic

Date: Thursday, March 2, 2017, 17h00-18h15 (CET time)

Session coordinator: Usama A. Gad (Ain-Shams University, Cairo)

YouTube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FnBwD3EagQ

Slides: slides

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Summary

The session introduces the students to the topic of translation alignment. The first part of the presentation will be devoted to a general introduction about translation alignment. The second part will give them an overview of both direct (i.e. from Greek) and indirect (i.e. from English) Arabic translations of Herodotus’ Histories (mainly books 2 and 4). The third and last part of the session is going to be a live demonstration of how to do produce a translation alignment using the Alpheios Alignment Editor integrated into the Perseids platform. Before the class, students are encouraged to create an account in Perseids (http://sosol.perseids.org/sosol/signin), if they do not have already done it before. Students are required to have either a basic competence in EITHER Greek OR Arabic (not both!). Every student should also install the Alpheios (http://alpheios.net/) reading tools in order to be able to look up the meaning(s) as well as the morpho-syntactic analysis of whatever word(s) she/he might be unfamiliar with. They work with Firefox only (as Add-ons from here https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/collections/the-alpheios-project/alpheios/).

Outline

• General Introduction about translation alignment.
• Herodotus in Arabic: An overview of Arabic translations of Herodotus’ Histories.
• Practical examples.

Required readings

• How to produce a translation alignment: http://sites.tufts.edu/perseids/instructions/translation-alignment/
  • Alpheios Alignment Editor: http://alpheios.net/alpheios-demos/alignment/
• Herodotus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herodotus.
  • Histories (especially books 2 and 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histories_(Herodotus).
  • George Rawlinson’s English translation of Herodotus: http://classics.mit.edu/Herodotus/history.2.ii.html.
  • A. D. Godley’s English translation of Herodotus: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0016.tlg001.perseus-eng1:1.2.1.
  • Book 2 of Herodotus’ Histories: listen to Common Session of the Spring 2017 Sunoikisis’s Herodotus course: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7AYDf5LdCg * Enoch Powell’s a Lexicon to Herodotus: http://www.graeco-arabic-studies.org/home.htmhttp://stephanus.tlg.uci.edu/powell/#eid=1&context=lsj l.
  • Arabic translations of Herodotus: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_OYtJoqV3Ytd2gzWjRfWVFJMm8/view?usp=sharing

Further readings

• Véronis,J. ed. (2000) Parallel Text Processing: Alignment and Use of Translation Corpora (Text, Speech and Language Technology vol. 13), Dordrecht, pp. 1-24.
• Introduction to Translation Alignment (Part 1):https://github.com/SunoikisisDC/SunoikisisDC-2016/wiki/Aligned-Translations,-Treebanking-Part-I-(May-11).
• Introduction to Translation Alignment (Part 2):https://github.com/SunoikisisDC/SunoikisisDC-2016/wiki/Aligned-Translations,-Treebanking-Part-II-(May-18).
• Translation Alignment using some of Aristotle's texts https://github.com/SunoikisisDC/SunoikisisDC-2016/wiki/Aristotle:-Translation-Alignment-%28Greek,-Latin,-Arabic%29-%28April-27%29#aristotle-translation-alignment-greek-latin-arabic-april-27.
• NLP - 10. Introduction to Machine Translation: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8A9YnNul1M&list=PLO9y7hOkmmSH8_IPjBUf7msTyLIBsV56b]

Essay title

Discuss the importance of translation alignment in understaning/visulizing the reasoned decisions (both strategic decisions and decisions in detail) made by the English and Arabic translators of Herodotus.

Practical exercise

• First: align the following Greek texts (Hdt. 2.1.1) with A.D. Godley’s English Translation (below it) τελευτήσαντος δὲ Κύρου παρέλαβε τὴν βασιληίην Καμβύσης, Κύρου ἐὼν παῖς καὶ Κασσανδάνης τῆς Φαρνάσπεω θυγατρός, τῆς προαποθανούσης Κῦρος αὐτός τε μέγα πένθος ἐποιήσατο καὶ τοῖσι ἄλλοισι προεῖπε πᾶσι τῶν ἦρχε πένθος ποιέεσθαι.

  After the death of Cyrus, Cambyses inherited his throne. He was the son of Cyrus and of Cassandane, the daughter of Pharnaspes, for whom Cyrus mourned deeply when she died before him, and had all his subjects mourn also.

• Second: using this Greek-Arabic alignment of the same text (http://sosol.perseids.org/alpheios/app/align-editsentence-perseids.xhtml?s=1&numSentences=1&doc=42292 ), try to align the English translation to the Arabic one.

• Third: Try to figure out the meaning of every Arabic word (don’t below up your mind, just use Alpheios Arabic reading tools, if you encounter any difficulties).