A Digital Humanities Approach to Cultural Translation in Robert Southey&#x02019;s Amadis of Gaul

Stacey Triplette; Elisa Beshero-Bondar; Helena Berm&#x000fa;dez Sabel

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Journal of Translation Studies ›› 2018, Vol. 2 ›› Issue (1) : 35-58.

A Digital Humanities Approach to Cultural Translation in Robert Southey’s Amadis of Gaul

Stacey Triplette, Elisa Beshero-Bondar, Helena Bermúdez Sabel

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University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg;
University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg;
Laboratorio de Innovación en Humanidades Digitales National Distance Education University

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Stacey Triplette is Assistant Professor of Spanish and French at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg. Her essays on Cervantes and Iberian romances of chivalry have appeared in Bulletin of Spanish Studies, La corónica, and Cervantes: The Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America. Her book, Reading, Chivalry, and Women’s Culture in Early Modern Spain, is forthcoming from Amsterdam University Press. Her current research engages in digital humanities approaches to translations from early modern Spanish to French and English.
Elisa Beshero-Bondar is Associate Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg. Her book, Women, Epic, and Transition in British Romanticism, was published by the University of Delaware Press in 2011. Her published articles in ELH (English Literary History), Genre, Philological Quarterly, and The Wordsworth Circle investigate the poetry of Robert Southey, Mary Russell Mitford, and Lord Byron. She is the architect of the Digital Mitford Project and other web-based digital humanities projects. She was elected to serve from 2016 to 2019 on the TEI Technical Council, an eleven-member international committee that supervises amendments to the TEI Guidelines.
Helena Bermúdez Sabel is pursuing her PhD in Medieval Studies at the Universidade de Santiago de Compostela (Spain). Her research interests focus on the modeling of philological data and the implementation of quantitative analyses as part of editorial models. She is involved in the publication of digital scholarly editions and the development of tools for text analytics. She is currently working for the ERC-funded project Poetry Standardization and Linked Open Data (POSTDATA) and is a member of the Laboratorio de Innovación en Humanidades Digitales (LINHD-UNED).

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Abstract

This essay discusses the Amadis in Translation digital project (http://amadis.newtfire.org), which applies TEI XML encoding to Robert Southey’s 1806 translation Amadis of Gaul, comparing it to Southey’s source, the 1547 Sevilla edition of Garci Rodríquez de Montalvo’s Amadís de Gaula. The project uses computational methods to align the source at the clause level rather than word-by-word, reflecting the radical compressions and changes Southey made to the source. The essay uses the alignment tables generated by the project to assess Southey’s use of emotion in a set of sample chapters. Contrary to what the aesthetics of the Romantic era might have led us to believe, the data show that Southey dampened the use of emotion in the source text, potentially for reasons of taste or national and cultural identity. Our digital project illustrates how computational analysis of translations can revise commonsense predictions about texts and make comparisons between translations precise and quantifiable.

Key words

Southey / Amadis / digital humanities / TEI / Spanish / and English

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Stacey Triplette, Elisa Beshero-Bondar, Helena Bermúdez Sabel. A Digital Humanities Approach to Cultural Translation in Robert Southey’s Amadis of Gaul[J]. Journal of Translation Studies. 2018, 2(1): 35-58

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