Andrea Bellandi

Traduco: A collaborative web-based CAT environment for the interpretation and translation of texts

Traduco is a web-based collaborative tool aimed at supporting the translation of texts that pose particular challenging interpretative issues. Nowadays, Computer-Assisted Translation (CAT) tools are mainly applied to the translation of technical manuals or legislative texts and are aimed at speeding up the translation process. Traduco extends most of the standard components of a traditional CAT tool with specific features necessary to support the interpretation and translation of complex texts (like the Babylonian Talmud, that we here present as a case study), which pose particular comprehension issues. Traduco goes beyond the translation and its printing: it includes features for the addition of notes and annotations and the creation of glossaries. Translators, editors, supervisors, and end-users accessing Traduco are able to use components that can ease the translation process through the use of CAT technologies, the supervision and managing of the whole process of translation and publishing, the exporting of translations and notes in standard formats for desktop publishing software and TEI format, and, soon, the possibility to perform automatic linguistic analysis of the text. Moreover, Traduco allows the users to insert notes, comments, annotations, and bibliographical references. The design and development of Traduco required the adoption of a multidisciplinary approach, leveraging on advances in software engineering, computational linguistics, knowledge engineering, and publishing.

Leveraging a Narrative Ontology to Query a Literary Text.

In this work we propose a model for the representation of the narrative of a literary text. The model is structured in an ontology and a lexicon constituting a knowledge base that can be queried by a system. This narrative ontology, as well as describing the actors, locations, situations found in the text, provides an explicit formal representation of the timeline of the story. We will focus on a specific case study, that of the representation of a selected portion of Homers Odyssey, in particular of the knowledge required to answer a selection of salient queries, formulated by a literary scholar. This work is being carried out within the framework of the Semantic Web by adopting models and standards such as RDF, OWL, SPARQL, and lemon among others.

When Translation Requires Interpretation: Collaborative Computer--Assisted Translation of Ancient Texts

This paper introduces the main features of Traduco, a Web-based, collaborative Computer-Assisted Translation (CAT) tool developed to support the translation of ancient texts. In addition to the standard components offered by traditional CAT tools, Traduco includes a number of features designed to ease the translation of ancient texts, such as the Babylonian Talmud, posing specific structural, stylistic, linguistic and hermeneutical challenges.

Graphic Visualization in Literary Text Interpretation

This article discusses a possible approach combining existing technologies for Natural Language Processing (NLP), Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KRR) and Data Visualization in a coherent Decision Support System (DSS) aimed to formulate and verify specific interpretative hypotheses about a certain text. The approach chosen for developing this system implies (i.) the customization and integration of existing tools for automatic text annotation (first of all, linguistic, lexicographic and semantic) and (ii.) the construction of a user-friendly and highly expressive GUI. The interface is conceived to allow users to (i.) upload the text/s they are studying, (ii) run the desired annotation tools, and (iii.) visually interact with the resulting multi-layered network to explore the network, proof-read the results of the automatic annotations and add missing elements and/or relations between elements.