Author: Nina Asatryan

Voyant and Antconc…seems these two platforms are equally good. However, each of them has its own positive and negative sides.

Positive sides of Voyant, and here I am going to use my previous essay,  are that it’s a good tool for the text analysis but only for prose, not for poems. To analyse the poem better to use poemage, because it gives you all the “technical” part of the poem-analysis. However in Voyant I found that Cirrus, Links, Reader and Collocates are very comfortable to use for the poem as well.

My top-10 words for the English translation are monument, death, alive, muse, silent, grow, pyramids, stone, plaster, die.  For the Russian text it’s a bit different: die, muse,soul, no mention of the word “monument” in the Russian analysis. However, “monument”and the word “die” are patterns in this texts.

(English translation)

(Russian translation)

This is how my word-collocation works for English:

As you can see “monument” , “death” and “alive” have the most collocations, which shows the idea of the poem – the author goes against death and with his works he is building a monument and becoming “immortal” or he’s staying “alive”.

Word collocation:

This is very useful, we see how words are surrounded by each other and it shows us the context where we can read the words.  For this sort of work Voyant is amazing to use.

Antconc has also a lot of advantages, for instance, search with the key words, word collocation, cluster analysis, n-grams and etc. That shows us the position of the word in the text, which very useful because looking up at the position of the word we can make already the analysis without wasting time searching for that word in the text, the platform does it for you. All you need to do is give  the program the proper task, for example, word “monument” and the program shows you all the texts where you have this word and its position in the text.

Antconc unlike Voyant does not read or “understand” Russian laguage, and when I tried to search in Russian, it showed  me these nice numbers:

Working with more than English language gives Voyant a big step up, in my opinion.

I like also to work with word concordance, where after you found the word and files where it can be, you click on it  and you go straight to the text you have chosen:

As for my work now, i.e. for the poems that I am analyzing, Antconc is a useful tool as well as the Voyant, however Voyant helps you with the word frequency. That means that Antconk and Voyant are very useful together: one gives you keyword list, word list, concordance…and another one are Cirrus, Links, Reader and Collocates. They help to organize your text, give you hints for the analysis. They both are very handy and easy to use, but for a poetry analysis it’s not enough. On the other, if I want to show the difference between English-Russian translation I can go to Voyant, and using the word collocations and links see how the translation and original texts works with each other. For example, what is the word order, is the translator using the same words or he is creating a new ones and etc.

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…