Using Parallel Corpora to Evaluate Translations of Ancient Greek Literary Texts. An Application of Text Alignment for Digital Philology Research

This paper presents a workflow to systematically compare translations of Ancient Greek into English and Persian through the analysis of parallel corpora aligned manually at word level. We extracted the translation pairs, measured word intersections, alignment types, and part of speech matches, in order to investigate quantitative indicators of closeness to the original and similarity across translations. The corpus includes passages from the Iliad and the Hippolytus by Euripides. In addition to direct translations, we have included some indirect translations of the Iliad in Persian, where French was used as a mediating language.