Introduction
Coined by the semiotician and literary critic Julia Kristeva in 1969, intertextuality is a term that encompasses the ways in which one piece of text can refer to another Kristeva ( 1986 [1969] ) . It can range from direct quotation to semantic resemblance, both within and between works, highlighting that “no text is an island,” and that a text can only be understood as part of a matrix of other texts, impacting both literary theory and translation theory that followed Moyise ( 2002 ) . For example, intertextual allusions can be seen throughout James Joyce’s retelling of Homer’s Odyssey in his 1922 novel, Ulysses , realized through a broad range of linguistic and narrative correspondences Currie ( 2019 ) , such as the pairing between characters from each book: Molly/Penelope, Stephen/Telemachus and Leopold/Odysseus.

As earlier scholarship on computational detection of intertextuality points out, intertextual references have two main functions:
to express similarity between two passages, “so that the latter can be interpreted in light of the former”; but also to highlight their differences, in that the earlier context they reference can be revised Bamman and Crane ( 2008 ) . For example, in the film The Matrix (1999) the white rabbit serves as an intertextual reference to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) by Lewis Carroll. However, inverting the original context in which Alice was falling into a dream-land, Neo is now waking up from one. Intertextual references of this type set up a link akin to a two-way “traffic”—inviting both similarities and differences Hays ( 1989 ) . They are a prominent feature of Classical texts, notably the New Testament and its references to the Hebrew Bible Bamman and Crane ( 2008 ) . Table 1 shows one such example. Biblical intertextuality can range from explicit quotation to echoes of formulaic language, and many examples have since been cataloged Hays ( 1989 ) .

Detecting intertextual references contributes toward a contextualized understanding of the “full semiotic density” of a any given text Broderick ( 2017 ) and therefore identifying intertextuality and the degree to which it is preserved in translation is crucial for the interpretation and appreciation of literary and historical texts. Due to its significance, computational methods for identifying intertextuality have become an expanding field of research, and it is closely connected to other NLP tasks that are grouped under narrative reasoning and comprehension Sang et al. ( 2022 ); Piper et al. ( 2021 ) .
Significant attention has been devoted to identifying text reuse (implicit intertextuality) in Biblical text Lee ( 2007 ); Moritz et al. ( 2016 ) , classical Latin poetry Burns et al. ( 2021 ); Bamman and Crane ( 2008 ) , Latin prose Dexter et al. ( 2017 ) , and Romantic poetry Forstall and Scheirer ( 2019 ) . Several of these works, Burns et al. ( 2021 ) in particular, highlight that neural embeddings can be used effectively to capture intertextuality. However, not much attention has been paid to the effects of translation on intertextual references.

In this work, we look at translation effects on intertextuality in the Bible through neural embedding spaces. While the Bible is often treated as one text, it is in fact a library of texts written by an estimated 60 different authors over the course of 4,000 years, and therefore offers a unique test bed for the detection of intertextuality and the effects of translation. This is especially true given the multilingual nature of the intertextuality between the New Testament and the Hebrew Bible in their original Greek and Hebrew.

Our main contributions are as follows:

We show that multilingual embedding spaces may be effectively used to characterize intertextuality in original documents as well as their translations.

We provide a new method for characterizing intertextuality within and across translations.

We conduct a comparative study of human- and machine-generated translations of the same corpus into different languages of varying resource levels.

We contribute to Classical and Biblical scholarship that qualitatively explores whether human translations have, purposefully or not, amplified intertextuality between the old and new testaments for the sake of continuity 2 2 2 For instance, Erich Auerbach underlines that Paul’s historical mission among the Gentiles needed to separate Christianity from Judaism by conveying the idea that “the old Law is suspended and replaced” through references that both alluded to and recontextualized the Hebrew Bible Auerbach ( 1959 ) Sirin ( 2022 ) . .