Aligning Immanuel Kant’s Work and its Translations

his chapter discusses using CLARIN to edit Kant’s work and to con- sider how to align it with its translations, with special attention to Chinese. Kangde 康德 is the two-character phonetic loan that renders Kant’s name in Chinese. We have chosen Kangde 康德 as the name for our vision to express the challenge of setting up the new edition of the Druckschriften and their Chinese translation in the form of aligned corpora, thus opening up the way to further alignments with versions in other languages. From a philosophical-historical and cultural-political perspective, the chapter presents the idea of aligning two parallel corpora of around 1,580,000 German words and the corresponding characters in Chinese. The project is curiosity-driven and lays the foundations for investigating Kant’s philosophy and discussing it in a global context, a long- term effort that relies on the synergies among philosophy, computational lin- guistics, machine learning, translation studies, and China studies. The idea of the alignment is to offer unrivalled material for historical-philosophical investi- gations and serve as a viable infrastructure to be scaled up to other languages. To date, few aligned corpora exist that connect German and Chinese philosoph- ical texts. The tools are not statistically implemented. As suggested by Franco Moretti’s notion of distant reading, experimentation on meaningful patterns in philosophical corpora is a step towards making new machine learning technol- ogies usable for tackling issues in the humanities. Looking forward, we focus on the assumption that philosophers ought to explore new technologies to rethink conventional ways of interpreting texts in the humanities

Phraseology in Corpus-Based Translation Studies: A Stylistic Study of Two Contemporary Chinese Translations of Cervantes's Don Quijote

The present work sets out to investigate the stylistic profiles of two modern Chinese versions of Cervantes’s Don Quijote (I): by Yang Jiang (1978), the first direct translation from Castilian to Chinese, and by Liu Jingsheng (1995), which is one of the most commercially successful versions of the Castilian literary classic. This thesis focuses on a detailed linguistic analysis carried out with the help of the latest textual analytical tools, natural language processing applications and statistical packages. The type of linguistic phenomenon singled out for study is four-character expressions (FCEXs), which are a very typical category of Chinese phraseology. The work opens with the creation of a descriptive framework for the annotation of linguistic data extracted from the parallel corpus of Don Quijote. Subsequently, the classified and extracted data are put through several statistical tests. The results of these tests prove to be very revealing regarding the different use of FCEXs in the two Chinese translations. The computational modelling of the linguistic data would seem to indicate that among other findings, while Liu’s use of archaic idioms has followed the general patterns of the original and also of Yang’s work in the first half of Don Quijote I, noticeable variations begin to emerge in the second half of Liu’s more recent version. Such an idiosyncratic use of archaisms by Liu, which may be defined as style shifting or style variation, is then analyzed in quantitative terms through the application of the proposed context-motivated theory (CMT). The results of applying the CMT-derived statistical models show that the detected stylistic variation may well point to the internal consistency of the translator in rendering the second half of Part I of the novel, which reflects his freer, more creative and experimental style of translation. Through the introduction and testing of quantitative research methods adapted from corpus linguistics and textual statistics, this thesis has made a major contribution to methodological innovation in the study of style within the context of corpus-based translation studies

Phraseology in Corpus-based transaltion studies : stylistic study of two contempoarary Chinese translation of Cervantes's Don Quijote

The present work sets out to investigate the stylistic profiles of two modern Chinese versions of Cervantes???s Don Quijote (I): by Yang Jiang (1978), the first direct translation from Castilian to Chinese, and by Liu Jingsheng (1995), which is one of the most commercially successful versions of the Castilian literary classic. This thesis focuses on a detailed linguistic analysis carried out with the help of the latest textual analytical tools, natural language processing applications and statistical packages. The type of linguistic phenomenon singled out for study is four-character expressions (FCEXs), which are a very typical category of Chinese phraseology. The work opens with the creation of a descriptive framework for the annotation of linguistic data extracted from the parallel corpus of Don Quijote. Subsequently, the classified and extracted data are put through several statistical tests. The results of these tests prove to be very revealing regarding the different use of FCEXs in the two Chinese translations. The computational modelling of the linguistic data would seem to indicate that among other findings, while Liu???s use of archaic idioms has followed the general patterns of the original and also of Yang???s work in the first half of Don Quijote I, noticeable variations begin to emerge in the second half of Liu???s more recent version. Such an idiosyncratic use of archaisms by Liu, which may be defined as style shifting or style variation, is then analyzed in quantitative terms through the application of the proposed context-motivated theory (CMT). The results of applying the CMT-derived statistical models show that the detected stylistic variation may well point to the internal consistency of the translator in rendering the second half of Part I of the novel, which reflects his freer, more creative and experimental style of translation. Through the introduction and testing of quantitative research methods adapted from corpus linguistics and textual statistics, this thesis has made a major contribution to methodological innovation in the study of style within the context of corpus-based translation studies.Imperial Users onl

Searching for Statesmanship: A corpus-based analysis of a translated political discourse

With its connotations of superior moral integrity, exceptional leadership qualities and expertise in the science of government, the modern ideal of statesmanship is most commonly traced back to the ancient Greek concept of πολιτικός (politikos) and the work of Plato and Aristotle in particular. Through an analysis of a large corpus of modern English translations of political works, built as part of the AHRC Genealogies of Knowledge project (http://genealogiesofknowledge.net/), this case-study aims to explore patterns that are specific to this translated discourse, with a view to understanding the crucial role played by translators in shaping its development and reception in society. It ultimately seeks to argue that the model of statesmanship presented in translations from ancient Greek is just as much a product of the receiving culture (and the social anxieties of Victorian Britain especially) as it is inherited from the classical world

A Critical Comparative Scriptural Analysis of Genesis 1:1-5 based on Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, Greek, and Coptic Manuscripts

A translation of Gen. 1:1-5 may seem to be both close and far at the same time from the original Hebrew text because of historical, geographical, theological, cultural, philological, and linguistic reasons. The scribes who translated the biblical narrative of the creation of light from Hebrew to a lingua franca of their time had a translation technique. They knew what they were doing. They provided a translation that the people of their time (d’alors) could understand, depending on a consideration of the milieu where they lived, and the jargon used to express their ideas – straight or in a zigzag manner – derived from the Hebraic text. This dissertation demonstrates that with regards to the translators of Gen. 1:1-5 from Hebrew to Aramaic, Syriac, Greek, and Coptic, their translations suggest what they were doing as scribes, their ideologies, and their methodology for their word choices. Fascinatingly, Gen. 1:1-5 meant different things for interpreters of the same biblical passage from the Essenes to scholars of modern times. I try to discern what it was for each period. In this work, a study of both the original text and the translations are provided. I present a critical comparative scriptural analysis of Gen. 1:1-5 based on Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, Greek, and Coptic manuscripts. First, to reach this goal, I deal with the accuracy of the translation and its fidelity to the thought of the biblical writers, as the worldview and theology of the scribes influenced their translations. Second, I weigh the significance of the lexical and grammatical details of the Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, Greek, and Coptic texts of the first day of creation (Gen. 1:1-5). Third, my aim is to show how complicated translation work is and to highlight how subtle shifts in translation change meaning. The reader of the Hebrew original text and these five translations has a broader view of the creation of light than the view that is presented just by the Hebrew Bible, because no one text can claim to have said it all. Last but not least, I explain, with the help of an historico-philological method of interpretation, the meaning of the Biblical text, to arrive, as nearly as possible, at the sense that the words of Gen. 1:1-5 were intended to have for the reader at the time when they were written

Language vs. grammatical tradition in Ancient India: how real was Pāṇinian Sanskrit? Evidence from the history of late Sanskrit passives and pseudo-passives

by Pāṇinian grammarians and the forms and constructions that are actually attested in the Vedic corpus (a part of which is traditionally believed to underlie Pāṇinian grammar). Concentrating on one particular aspect of the Old Indian verbal system, viz. the morphology and syntax of present formations with the suffix ‑ya-, I will provide a few examples of such discrepancy. I will argue that the most plausible explanation of this mismatch can be found in the peculiar sociolinguistic situation in Ancient India: a number of linguistic phenomena described by grammarians did not appear in Vedic texts but existed within the semi-colloquial scholarly discourse of the learned community of Sanskrit scholars (comparable to Latin scholarly discourse in Medieval Europe). Some of these phenomena may result from the influence of Middle Indic dialects spoken by Ancient Indian scholars, thus representing syntactic and morphological calques from their native dialects onto the Sanskrit grammatical system

Transfer of Medical Knowledge in Premodern Jewish Cultures and Traditions

This volume brings together a group of scholars from different fields within Jewish studies who deal with Jewish medical knowledge in ancient and medieval time from a comparative perspective. Based on various methodological and theoretical questions, they address strategies of interaction with earlier Jewish traditions and with other fields of rabbinic discourse (e.g. law, theology, ethics), while exploring the complex interplay between literary forms and the knowledge conveyed. The studies trace the ways of transmission, transformation, rejection, modification and invention of pertinent knowledge in Jewish traditions and beyond by examining broader contexts and points of contact with medical ideas and practices in surrounding cultures (Ancient Near Eastern, Graeco-Roman, Byzantine, Persian-Iranian, early Christian, Syriac, Coptic, Arabic and Islamic). Such a twofold perspective allows for assessing particularities of the medical discourse within Jewish history, while probing its transcultural interactions with other medical traditions. These studies may serve as a starting point for further inquiries into the role of these exchanges and entanglements, not only within a broader history of medicine, sciences and knowledge, but also for the history of premodern cultures and religions at large

Meaningfulness, the unsaid and translatability. Instead of an introduction

The present paper opens this topical issue on translation techniques by drawing a theoretical basis for the discussion of translational issues in a linguistic perspective. In order to forward an audience- oriented definition of translation, I will describe different forms of linguistic variability, highlighting how they present different difficulties to translators, with an emphasis on the semantic and communicative complexity that a source text can exhibit. The problem is then further discussed through a comparison between Quine's radically holistic position and the translatability principle supported by such semanticists as Katz. General translatability — at the expense of additional complexity — is eventually proposed as a possible synthesis of this debate. In describing the meaningfulness levels of source texts through Hjelmslevian semiotics, and his semiotic hierarchy in particular, the paper attempts to go beyond denotative semiotic, and reframe some translational issues in a connotative semiotic and metasemiotic perspective