To say almost the same thing? A study on cross-linguistic variation in ancient texts and their translations

Abstract

Abstract This article presents a study of several parallel corpora of historical languages and their translations. The aligned corpora are the result of a large crowdsourcing project, named Ugarit, aimed at supporting translation alignment for ancient and historical languages: the study of the resulting translation pairs allows us to observe cross-linguistic dynamics in a range of languages, some of which have never been systematically aligned before. The corpora considered are divided into two distinct groups: English translations of ancient languages, including Greek, Latin, Persian, and Coptic; and translations of ancient Greek into other languages, including Latin, English, Georgian, Italian, and Persian. We evaluated different ratios of word matching across each language pair (one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-one, and many-to-many), and analyzed the resulting trends across the corpus. We propose some observations on how and why different types of alignment links are established in a given language pair, and what factors affect their creation beyond the control of the user: we propose two complementary hypotheses to explain the changes, one based on structural linguistic factors and the other based on cultural difference.