Lunch Lecture: Patterns in Translation
The Peshitta, the Syriac translation of the Hebrew Bible, has been well-studied in traditional scholarship. Nevertheless, it still remains under explored from a computational perspective. Digitization methods of the ETCBC have made it possible to open this text up for machine translation scrutiny.
Donderdag 1 juni, 12:00 - 13:00
In this lunch lecture, Mathias Coeckelbergs will summarize the findings for the PaTraCoSy project (PAtterns in TRAnslation: Using COlibri Core for the SYriac Bible). The overall goal of this project is to use the Colibri Core environment to detect translation patterns between the Hebrew Bible and the Peshitta, its Syriac translation, thus providing a follow-up of the CLARIAH research pilot Linking Syriac Data.
First, Mathias will explain the goals of the project, the value of the Hebrew-Syriac corpus for computational studies, and the purpose of the CLARIAH component Colibri-Core within their project. After these preliminaries, he will continue to discuss the results in three steps. First of all, he will discuss the creation of word and phrase alignments for our language pair, as this is a necessary step to use Colibri-Core. He will also provide examples to clarify the alignment procedure. Secondly, he will show how we use several features of Colibri-Core to identify remarkable translation patterns. After a discussion of some general insights, he will show a typology of attested patterns, each characterized by a concrete example from the book of Genesis. Thirdly, Mathias will indicate the usefulness of log-likelihood computation for a further clarification of these results.
This CLARIAH Lunch lecture will be presented by:
Mathias Coeckelbergs
Teaching Assistant and PhD student at Université libre de Bruxelles and KU Leuven