For my corpus I’ve chosen literary texts, which original format, I suppose, is digitized printed books. I collected texts from four authors, I include Russian, English and Latin translation of the texts. In total I’m working with nine texts, it should give the representative sample. The range of my texts starts with Ancient Greece and Horace, then the Russian Empire in the XVIII-th century with Lomonosov, after the Russian Empire in the XIX-th century with Pushkin and it ends with the Soviet Union and Vladimir Vysotskiy. The three poems are not long, one page each, however the song is a bit longer, two pages.
I want to see how the idea of building “monument” in poetry is changing from one century to another, which role translation plays and how it’s influencing on the main idea of the original text. I want to see if the machine will come up with the same results as researches in their works without all digital tools that we have nowadays.
There a lot of poems with the idea when poet is building monument in his honor to make his work immortal. This tradition begun with Horace and I took Latin, Russian and English translation of his Monument. Since I’m working with Russian literature I decided to start with Lomonosov who arise this topic in Russian poetry in the XVIII-th century. The next poem is by Pushkin and with Pushkin Russian language changes a lot, he is the father of the Russian poetry and he reformed the language, the style a lot. Even thought it’s one century difference the language and writing style is totally different and I’ wondering if the program can these differences and show it to us. The last but not the least is the song by Vysotskiy where he’s building a monument for his work. Vysotskiy represents another style, we call it bard song. Also he lived in the XX-th century during the Soviet Union time when the government changed the language to its modern state we speak now.
At the end of the analysis I expect to have a clear picture of which words or phrases are repeated, are these repetitions synonyms or not and according to that how does the translation change the original text, its meaning, its atmosphere. Also it’s interesting to compare poetic metric systems because it’s different for every language and how the translators were solving these problems. The main result of this work should show how the idea of building the monument has changed through the centuries. If it, actually, did…