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

Abstract

Abstract: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 re-translated many times. These translations and re-translations 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 re-translations 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 fifty-five different German re-translations of Shakespeare's play, Othello. The re-translations date from between 1766 and 2010. A sub-corpus of 32 re-translations has been prepared as a digital parallel corpus. We would like to develop methods of exploring patterns in variation between different translations. In this paper, we develope an interactive focus+context visualization system to present, analyze 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 re-translations of Othello and derive some insight.

TransVis: Integrated Distant and Close Reading of Othello Translations

“…The difference between the work presented in this section and our work is that Geng et al [27], [28] present only a subset of the collection and is difficult to scale accordingly. On the other hand, Cheesman et al's [21] alignment map aligns only one translation with the base text and does not encode any similarity features.…”

“…[74] which enables the user to investigate multiple documents side-by-side and integrates linking functionality to highlight corresponding text fragments. Similarly, multiple approaches use a side-by-side layout to represent compared objects, such as Jong et al [34], Welsh and Hooper [84], Behrisch et al [8], Wheeles and Jensen [86], the text view by Geng et al [27], the text reader by Jänicke et al [49], Howell et al [39], Cheesman et al [21], and Jänicke et al [50]. Asokarajan et al [5] visualize the variation in a pixelbase matrix where the x-axis represents the offset in the text and the y-axis represents the variation (witnesses).…”

“…Different approaches overlay parallel texts in the same coordinate system in order to communicate comparative objectives. For example, the variant graph in Jänicke et al [43], Storylines in Silvia et al [80], and Geng et al [27], [28]. The variant graphs and parallel coordinates visualization represent each object as a line in the visual space.…”

“…Geng et al [27] integrate multiple visual designs to illustrate the similarity between subsets of translations of Shakespeare's play Othello. They provide visual designs to support distant reading, such as heat maps to illustrate segment structure, and parallel coordinates to depict similarity among versions.…”

Visual analysis of online social media to open up the investigation of stance phenomena

“…Compus by Fekete and Dufournaud, 55 CorpusSeparator by Correll et al, 56 Text Variation Explorer by Siirtola et al, 57 and those techniques proposed by Regan and Becker 58 ), the analysis of relations or reuse (e.g. ShakerVis by Geng et al 59 and techniques proposed by Jänicke et al 60 ), and lexical analysis (e.g. the study by Rohrdantz et al 61 ).…”