Adapting Digital Annotations for Teaching Ancient Greek in Persian
Creators: name: Shamsian, Farnoosh
name: Gregory, Crane
name: Rahimi, Farshid
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2024

description: Adapting Digital Annotations for Teaching Ancient Greek in Persian

Farnoosh Shamsian (Leipzig University), Gregory Crane (Tufts University), Farshid Rahimi (Allameh Tabataba'i University)

This study discusses the significance of digital annotations in filling linguistic and cultural gaps in historical language pedagogy, examining how integrating digital annotations with conventional teaching methods can provide new possibilities for a more inclusive and effective approach to teaching historical texts in languages that have limited resources, such as Persian. We focus on employing digital tools and annotations to address the scarcity of educational materials available in Persian for studying Ancient Greek.

While the digital age has transformed how we interact with languages, there is still a significant digital divide since online resources and data often are only accessible in a very small number of languages. This study examines how proper localization of digital annotations available in English could fill this gap by creating pedagogical resources for teaching Ancient Greek in a low-resource language, such as Persian. This approach incorporates treebanks, parallel corpora, and other similar digital tools. It evaluates them in an educational context, assessing their impact on language acquisition, translation skills and reading comprehension in Persian-speaking learners. We are particularly focusing on resources that are cross-lingual or do not require a high degree of competence in another language to make them easier to translate and more accessible for speakers of other languages. For instance, treebanks, with their universal applicability, can be effectively used by Persian speakers simply through memorising a few key tags. Treebanks allow learners to visualize and analyze the grammatical structure of Ancient Greek sentences, enhancing their syntactic comprehension and ability to understand complex sentences (Mambrini 2016). Moreover, we have used parallel corpora as a foundational resource, enabling learners to compare Ancient Greek texts with their Persian translations.  We have used Ugarit translation alignment tool for building word-level alignments, either with an existing Persian translation or the student’s own translation (Yousef et al., 2022). Translation alignment has been used to replace or enrich other conventional exercises and evaluation methods, a method which has already been shown  to facilitate learning  and deepen comprehension of the source materials for English speakers (Palladino, 2022). Our findings from applying these methods in the classroom indicate the effectiveness of teaching Ancient Greek to Persian speakers through digital annotations, demonstrating how digital tools and annotations can be used to democratise access to Ancient Greek learning resources, enabling Persian speakers to directly engage with source texts, and not only improve the existing indirect translations in Persian, but to produce direct translations that are significantly more accurate (Shamsian & Crane, 2022).

Additionally, this research highlights the importance of localizing resources to align with the target language's linguistic framework and cultural context, addressing the distinct challenges faced by Persian-speaking learners. We have used modular grammar tools to provide learners with tailored grammatical explanations that were modified to meet Persian linguistic characteristics, inspired by the Pedalion modular grammar (Van Hal & Anné, 2017). For this purpose, Didakta Grammar for Annotation was developed by modifying Smyth’s “A Greek Grammar for Colleges” (1916) into a versatile, open-source grammar to provide comprehensive explanations and annotations for Ancient Greek syntax for learners (Shamsian, 2023). The adaptability of Didakta makes it suitable for implementation in a range of language learning environments and backgrounds. Through references to Pedalion grammar and Cambridge grammar for classical Greek (Emde Boas et al., 2019), Didakta aims to provide learners with comprehensive, contextually relevant information about other resources, bridging linguistic gaps and enhancing their overall understanding.

 

References:

Emde Boas, E. van, Rijksbaron, A., Huitink, L., & Bakker, M. de. (2019). Cambridge grammar of classical Greek. Cambridge University Press.

Mambrini, F. (2016). The Ancient Greek Dependency Treebank: Linguistic Annotation in a Teaching Environment. In University of London, G. Bodard, & M. Romanello (Eds.), Digital Classics Outside the Echo-Chamber: Teaching, Knowledge Exchange & Public Engagement (pp. 83–99). Ubiquity Press. https://doi.org/10.5334/bat.f

Palladino, C., Shamsian, F., & Yousef, T. (2022). Using Parallel Corpora to Evaluate Translations of Ancient Greek Literary Texts. Journal of Computational Literary Studies. https://doi.org/10.48694/JCLS.100

Palladino, C. (2022). Reading Texts in Digital Environments: Applications of Translation Alignment for Classical Language Learning. The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, 18. https://cuny.manifoldapp.org/read/reading-texts-in-digital-environments-applications-of-translation-alignment-for-classical-language-learning-310daf57-ed21-4150-b5ba-7386399ef905/section/5ae515f9-4e47-4a1e-a0c6-eb3b5f0b1a03

Shamsian, F., & Crane, G. (2022). Corpus-based translation training: Enhancing translations from a historical language. Translation in Transition 6. Translation in Transition 6, Prague, Czech Republic. https://tt2022.ff.cuni.cz/wp-content/uploads/sites/69/2022/09/TT2022_Programme_v2.pdf

Shamsian, F. (2023). Didakta Grammar for Annotation (English). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.11216456

Shamsian, F. (2023). Didakta Grammar for Annotation (Persian). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.11216819

Smyth, H. W. (1916). A Greek Grammar for Colleges. American Book Company.

Van Hal, T., & Anné, Y. (2017). Reconciling the Dynamics of Language with a Grammar Handbook: The Ongoing Pedalion Grammar Project. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 32(2), 448–454. https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqv068

Yousef, T., Palladino, C., Shamsian, F., & Foradi, M. (2022). Translation Alignment with Ugarit. Information, 13(2), 65. https://doi.org/10.3390/info13020065