Jour Fixe: HyperMachiavel. First results of a comparison tool between the first edition of The Prince and its French translations of the XVIth century

Jour Fixe

  • Datum: 15.05.2017
  • Uhrzeit: 12:00 - 13:00
  • Vortragende(r): Séverine Gedzelman (CNRS, UMR Triangle), Jean-Claude Zancarini (ENS de Lyon, UMR Triangle)
  • Ort: MPIeR
  • Raum: Z 01
Jour Fixe: <em>HyperMachiavel. </em>First results of a comparison tool between the first edition of <em>The Prince</em> and its French translations of the XVI<sup>th</sup> century

We will present the first results of a comparison study between the early French translations of Machiavelli's The Prince (Jacques de Vintimille 1546, Gaspard d’Auvergne et Jacques Cappel 1553, Jacques Gohory 1571 and Amelot de la Houssaie 1683) and its editio princeps by Blado 1532. The work published online was done thanks to a tool specifically designed for the project called “HyperMachiavel”, but referred to as HM.

Inspired by machine translation and lexicographic domains, HM proposes an annotation environment dedicated to the edition of lexical correspondences between different versions of a text and assist humanities researchers in their interpretations of the quality and the specificities of the translator’s work.

After the annotation campaign linking some focused lexicon with its equivalences in targeted languages (in our case we have for now only italian-french but any pair of languages could work, depending on the TEI aligned corpora), results can be analyzed through some visualisations like graphs, tables and piecharts. The "new things" that Machiavelli states like stato are complex and their "semantic territories" intersect and overlap. HM makes it possible to verify the hypothesis of permanent polysemy of terms - polysemy that comes from how Machiavelli tries to describe (using sometimes the same words in different meaning) the new objects or forms of political action. By using systematic comparison between translator's version for any displayed results, one can see and understand the differences in approach between the translators and highlight their lexical and syntactic choices (for instance, see the notions virtù, or ordini). We can see what's playing at every moment in this or that choice.

Zur Redakteursansicht