Seminar 04/03/2016

The Odysseus Tool aims at giving a quick and thorough approach of the evolution of different translations, in our case French translations from the XVIth to the XXth century. Scholars, but also students, may need to see how translation practices evolve through time and space, for specific texts. Our tool was designed to allow us to access many translations at once (in Italian, English and French for now) of one single source text, in our case Homer’s Odyssey, and see possible evolutive patterns in translation practices. The translations are automatically aligned and compared. The process can be divided in two different steps : first, all the translations are aligned with a Greek source, with specific IDs. Then the aligned chunks are compared one to another. Every translation can be visualized simultaneously in the program interface, and scholars in translation can give their own interpretations based on tangible results. Thus the Odysseus Tool allows us to study both monolingual and plurilingual texts. It also allows us to examine existing external tools that can be used in that matter and suggest further developments the scholars in translation or comparative literature may need for future studies.