TL -Explorer: A Digital Humanities Tool for Mapping and Analyzing Translated Literature (2020)

Abstract: TL-Explorer is a digital humanities tool for mapping and analyzing translated literature, encompassing the World Map and the Translation Dashboard. The World Map displays collected literature of different languages, locations, and cultures and establishes the foundation for further analysis. It comprises three global maps for spatial and temporal interpretation. A further investigation into an individual point on the map leads to the Translation Dashboard. Each point represents one edition or translation. Collected translations are processed in order to build multilingual parallel corpora for a large number of under-resourced languages as well as to highlight the transnational circulation of knowledge. Our first rendition of TL-Explorer was conducted on the well-traveled American novel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain. The maps currently chronicle nearly 400 translations of this novel. And the dashboard supports over 30 collected translations. However, the TL-Explore is easily extended to other works of literature and is not limited to type of texts, such as academic manuscripts or constitutional documents to name a few.

## introduction and motivation from a global perspective, human knowledge of culture and heritage has been shared, explored, and preserved for nearly centuries through translation. the art of translating texts is largely to thank for our ability to learn about and from other cultures, and vice versa. it is crucial to recognize that every person is shaped by their culture and identity. hence, every body of knowledge, regardless of type of classification, is similarly impacted by specific historical, geopolitical, and sociocultural factors. tl-explorer is created not only with this diversity in mind, but also as a tool to explore these nuances as they are reflected in translated literature. tl-explorer is designed to provide users with a feeling of continuity as they explore translated texts. the tool begins at a broad starting point -a global view of the entire collection of texts -and allows the user to smoothly zoom into a particular geographic region, individual editions or translations in that region, and specific chapters and paragraphs within the selected literature. the tl-explorer uses a geographic information system (gis) to create the world map and nlp techniques to generate the translation dashboard. ## conclusion encompassing both of the world map and the translation dashboard, the tl-explorer allows for analysis of translated literature at an exceptional range of specificity. the world map provides a global view that can be shrunken into exact coordinates and streets and the translation dashboard allows for intense analysis of two texts from entire works to specific sentences. the tl-explorer similarly serves a purpose of preservation and globalization, representing a large number of under-resourced languages and a transnational circulation of knowledge.