ShakerVis: Visual analysis of segment variation of German translations of Shakespeare’s Othello

William Shakespeare is one of the world’s greatest writers. His plays have been translated into every major living language. In some languages, his plays have been retranslated many times. These translations and retranslations have evolved for about 250 years. Studying variations in translations of...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Information visualization Vol. 14; no. 4; pp. 273 - 288
Main Authors: Geng, Zhao, Cheesman, Tom, Laramee, Robert S., Flanagan, Kevin, Thiel, Stephan
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: London, England SAGE Publications 01.10.2015
SAGE PUBLICATIONS, INC
Subjects:
Analysis
Computerized corpora
Corpus analysis
Corpus linguistics
Cultural change
Cultural competence
Cultural factors
Cultural heritage
Digital humanities
Documents
Drama
English literature
Feedback
Genetics
German language
Humanities
Intergroup relations
Interpreters
Languages
Literature
Origin of language
Parallel corpora
Shakespeare plays
Speeches
Studies
Subject specialists
Theater
Translation
Translations
Translators
Visualization
Writers
Othello
text visualization
Segment variation
ISSN:1473-8716, 1473-8724
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:William Shakespeare is one of the world’s greatest writers. His plays have been translated into every major living language. In some languages, his plays have been retranslated many times. These translations and retranslations have evolved for about 250 years. Studying variations in translations of world cultural heritage texts is of cross-cultural interest for arts and humanities researchers. The variations between retranslations are due to numerous factors, including the differing purposes of translations, genetic relations, cultural and intercultural influences, rivalry between translators and their varying competence. A team of Digital Humanities researchers has collected an experimental corpus of 55 different German retranslations of Shakespeare’s play, Othello. The retranslations date between 1766 and 2010. A sub-corpus of 32 retranslations has been prepared as a digital parallel corpus. We would like to develop methods of exploring patterns in variation between different translations. In this article, we develop an interactive focus + context visualization system to present, analyse and explore variation at the level of user-defined segments. From our visualization, we are able to obtain an overview of the relationships of similarity between parallel segments in different versions. We can uncover clusters and outliers at various scales, and a linked focus view allows us to further explore the textual details behind these findings. The domain experts who are studying this topic evaluate our visualizations, and we report their feedback. Our system helps them better understand the relationships between different German retranslations of Othello and derive some insight.
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ISSN:1473-8716
1473-8724
DOI:10.1177/1473871613495845