Visualizing Translation Variation: Shakespeare’s Othello

Abstract

Abstract. Recognized as great works of world literature, Shakespeare's poems and plays have been translated into dozens of languages for over 300 years. Also, there are many re-translations into the same language, for example, there are more than 60 translations of Othello into German. Every translation is a different interpretation of the play. These large quantities of translations reflect changing culture and express individual thought by the authors. They demonstrate wide connections between different world regions today, and reveal a retrospective view of their cultural, intercultural, and linguistic histories. Researchers from Arts and Humanities at Swansea University are collecting a large number of translations of William Shakespeare's Othello. In this paper, we have developed an interactive visualization system to present, analyze and explore the variations among these different translations. Our system is composed of two parts: the structureaware Treemap for document selection and meta data analysis, and Focus + Context parallel coordinates for in-depth document comparison and exploration. In particular, we want to learn more about which content varies highly with each translation, and which content remains stable. We also want to form hypotheses as to the implications behind these variations. Our visualization is evaluated by the domain experts from Arts and Humanities.

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.…”

“…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.…”

“…In this section, we discuss previous visualizations of Shakespeare's Othello. Geng et al [28] introduce a focus+context parallel coordinates layout for comparing eight translations of Shakespeare's Othello. Their design consists of two main components.…”

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

“…Also, when handling a large document corpus, the parallel tag clouds might suffer from visual clutter due to the limited screen space. In order to address this, in our previous approach (Geng et al, 2011), we have developed a structure-aware Treemap for metadata analysis and document selection. Once a subset of documents are selected, they can be further analyzed by our Focus + Context parallel coordinates view.…”

Interactive Visual Analysis of Translations

“…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 [190], Storylines in Silvia et al [136], and Geng et al [58,64]. The variant graphs and parallel coordinates visualization represent each object as a line in the visual space.…”