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

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 retranslated many times. These translations and retranslations 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 retranslations 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 55 different German retranslations of Shakespeare’s play, Othello. The retranslations date between 1766 and 2010. A sub-corpus of 32 retranslations has been prepared as a digital parallel corpus. We would like to develop methods of exploring patterns in variation between different translations. In this article, we develop an interactive focus + context visualization system to present, analyse 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 retranslations of Othello and derive some insight.

Keywords

Segment variation text visualization

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Scott

Carl

Miguel

. Seeing things in the clouds: the effect of visual features on tag cloud selections. In: HT ’08: proceedings of the nineteenth ACM conference on hypertext and hypermedia, Pittsburgh, PA, USA, 2008, pp. 193–202. New York: ACM.

Provan

Wei

. Semantic-preserving word clouds by seam carving. Comput Graph Forum 2011; 30(3): 741–750.

Viegas

Wattenberg

Feinberg

. Participatory visualization with Wordle. IEEE T Vis Comput Gr 2009; 15(6): 1137–1144.

Strobelt

Spicker

Stoffel

. Rolled-out Wordles: a heuristic method for overlap removal of 2D data representatives. Comput Graph Forum 2012; 31(3): 1135–1144.

Wattenberg

Viegas

. The Word Tree, an interactive visual concordance. IEEE T Vis Comput Gr 2008; 14(6): 1221–1228.

Van Ham

Wattenberg

Viégas

. Mapping text with Phrase Nets. IEEE T Vis Comput Gr 2009; 15(6): 1169–1176.

Paley

. TextArc: an alternative way to view text, http://www.textarc.org/ (2002, accessed 18 February 2011).

Collins

Carpendale

MST

Penn

. DocuBurst: visualizing document content using language structure. Comput Graph Forum 2009; 28(3): 1039–1046.

Koh

Lee

Kim

. ManiWordle: providing flexible control over wordle. IEEE T Vis Comput Gr 2010; 16(6): 1190–1197.

10.

Mehta

. Tagline generator – timeline-based tag clouds, http://chir.ag/projects/tagline/ (2006, accessed 18 February 2011).

11.

Collins

Viegas

Wattenberg

. Parallel Tag Clouds to explore and analyze faceted text corpora. In: IEEE symposium on visual analytics science and technology, Atlantic city, New Jersey, USA, 11–16 October 2009, pp. 91–98. IEEE Computer Society.

12.

Havre

Hetzler

Whitney

. ThemeRiver: visualizing thematic changes in large document collections. IEEE T Vis Comput Gr 2002; 8(1): 9–20.

13.

Lee

Riche

Karlson

. SparkClouds: visualizing trends in tag clouds. IEEE T Vis Comput Gr 2010; 16(6): 1182–1189.

14.

Geng

Laramee

Cheesman

. Visualizing translation variation: Shakespeare’s Othello. In: International symposium on visual computing, Las Vegas, NV, USA, 26–28 September 2011, pp. 657–667.

15.

Jankun-Kelly

Wilson

Stamps

. Visual analysis for textual relationships in digital forensics evidence. Inform Visual (Special issue on VizSec 2009) 2011; 10(2): 134–144.

16.

Correll

Witmore

Gleicher

. Exploring collections of tagged text for literary scholarship. Comput Graph Forum 2011; 30(3): 731–740.

17.

Chou

J-K

Yang

C-K

. PaperVis: literature review made easy. Comput Graph Forum 2011; 30(1): 721–730.

18.

Rohrdantz

Hund

Mayer

. The world’s languages explorer: visual analysis of language features in genealogical and areal contexts. Comput Graph Forum 2012; 31(3): 935–944.

19.

Thiel

. Understanding Shakespeare, http://www.understanding-shakespeare.com/ (2006, accessed 16 January 2013).

20.

Carnegie Mellon University. DocuScope: computer-aided rhetorical analysis, http://www.cmu.edu/hss/english/research/docuscope.html (1998, accessed 16 January 2013).

21.

Hope

Witmore

. The very large textual object: a prosthetic reading of Shakespeare. Early Mod Lit Stud 2004; 9(3): 1–36.

22.

Cheesman

Flanagan

Thiel

. Translation array prototype, http://www.william-shakespeare.de/othello1/othello.htm (2012–2013).

23.

Cheesman T and the Version Variation Visualization Project Team. Translation sorting: Eddy and Viv in translation arrays, http://www.scribd.com/doc/101114673/Eddy-and-Viv (2011).

24.

Baudissin

. Othello, der Mohr von Venedig (edited by R Wenig for Project Gutenberg), http://gutenberg.spiegel.de/buch/2185/1 (1832).

25.

Brunner

. William Shakespeare, Othello, der Mohr von Venedig (Englischer Text mit deutscher Übersetzung nach Ludwig Tieck). Berlin, Germany: Britisch-Amerikanische Bibliothek, 1947.

26.

Engler

. Othello: Englisch-deutsche Studienausgabe. Munich: Franke, 1976.

27.

Bolte

. Othello: Englisch-Deutsch: William Shakespeare (Herausgegeben von Dieter Hamblockk). Stuttgart:Philipp Reclam jun, 1985.

28.

Zaimoglu

. William Shakespeare Othello. Munich, Germany: Verlagshaus Monsenstein und Vannerdatp, 2003.

29.

Flatter

. Othello der Mohr von Venedig. Munich: Theater-Verlag Desch, 1952.

30.

Schröder

. Shakespeare deutsch. Berlin and Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1962.

31.

Fried

. Hamlet und Othello. Berlin: Verlag Klaus Wagenbach, 1970.

32.

Lauterbach

. Othello, der Mohr von Venedig. Berlin: Henschel Schauspiel Theaterverlag, 1972.

33.

Laube

. Othello Der Mohr von Venedig überset und bearbeitet von Horst Laube. Frankfurt am Main: Verlag der Autoren, 1977.

34.

Davison

. Multidimensional scaling. Malabar, FL: Robert E. Krieger Publishing Co, Inc., 1992.

35.

Landauer

McNamara

Dennis

. Handbook of latent semantic analysis. New Jersey, US: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2007.

36.

Fodor

. A survey of dimension reduction techniques. Technical report, Centre for Applied Scientific Computing, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, 2002.

37.

Wunsch

. Survey of clustering algorithms. IEEE T Neural Networ 2005; 16: 645–678.

38.

Shneiderman

. The eyes have it: a task by data type taxonomy for information visualizations. In: Proceedings of 1996 IEEE symposium on visual languages, Boulder, Colorado, 3–6 September 1996, pp. 336–343. IEEE Computer Society

39.

Inselberg

Dimsdale

. Parallel coordinates: a tool for visualizing multi-dimensional geometry. In: Proceedings of IEEE visualization, San Francisco, California, 23–26 October 1990, pp. 361–378. IEEE Computer Society

40.

Inselberg

. Parallel coordinates: visual multidimensional geometry and its applications. Dordrecht Heidelberg London New York: Springer, 2009.

41.

Keim

. Information visualization and visual data mining. IEEE T Vis Comput Gr 2002; 8: 1–8.

42.

Gürcaglar

. Retranslation. In: Baker

Saldanha

(eds) Encyclopedia of translation studies. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2009, pp. 232–236.

43.

Hamburger

. Translating and copyright. In: Hoenselaars

(ed.) Shakespeare and the language of translation. London: Arden, 2006, pp. 148–166.

44.

Hanna

. Othello in Egypt: translation and the (Un)making of national identity. In: House

Rosario

Ruano

. (eds) Translation and the construction of identity. IATIS yearbook 2005. Manchester: St. Jerome, 2005, pp. 109–128.