ShakerVis: Visual analysis of segment variation of German translations of Shakespeare's Othello

William Shakespeare is one of the world’s greatest writers. His plays have been translated into every major living language. In some languages, his plays have been re-translated many times. These translations and re-translations have evolved for about 250 years. Studying variations in translations of world cultural heritage texts is of cross-cultural interest for arts and humanities researchers. The variations between re-translations are due to numerous factors including the differing purposes of translations, genetic relations, cultural and intercultural influences, rivalry between translators, and their varying competence. A team of Digital Humanities researchers has collected an experimental corpus of fifty-five different German re-translations of Shakespeare’s play, Othello. The re-translations date from between 1766 and 2010. A sub-corpus of 32 re-translations has been prepared as a digital parallel corpus. We would like to develop methods of exploring patterns in variation between different translations. In this paper, we develope an interactive focus+context visualization system to present, analyze and explore variation at the level of user-defined segments. From our visualization, we are able to obtain an overview of the relationships of similarity between parallel segments in different versions. We can uncover clusters and outliers at various scales, and a linked focus view allows us to further explore the textual details behind these findings. The domain experts who are studying this topic evaluate our visualizations and we report their feedback. Our system helps them better understand the relationships between different German re-translations of Othello and derive some insight.