Characterizing the Effects of Translation on Intertextuality using Multilingual Embedding Spaces (2025)

Abstract: Rhetorical devices are difficult to translate, but they are crucial to the translation of literary documents. We investigate the use of multilingual embedding spaces to characterize the preservation of intertextuality, one common rhetorical device, across human and machine translation. To do so, we use Biblical texts, which are both full of intertextual references and are highly translated works. We provide a metric to characterize intertextuality at the corpus level and provide a quantitative analysis of the preservation of this rhetorical device across extant human translations and machine-generated counterparts. We go on to provide qualitative analysis of cases wherein human translations over- or underemphasize the intertextuality present in the text, whereas machine translations provide a neutral baseline. This provides support for established scholarship proposing that human translators have a propensity to amplify certain literary characteristics of the original manuscripts.

## 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 @xcite ). 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 @xcite . 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 @xcite , 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 @xcite . 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 dreamland, neo is now waking up from one. intertextual references of this type set up a link akin to a twoway "traffic"-inviting both similarities and differences @xcite . they are a prominent feature of classical texts, notably the new testament and its references to the hebrew bible @xcite . detecting intertextual references contributes toward a contextualized understanding of the "full semiotic density" of a any given text @xcite 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 @xcite . significant attention has been devoted to identifying text reuse (implicit intertextuality) in biblical text @xcite , classical latin poetry @xcite , latin prose @xcite , and romantic po-exodus 14:21 revelation 16:12 hebrew bible new testament 20 [...] and it was a cloud and darkness to them, but it gave light by night to these: so that the one came not near the other all the night. 11 and blasphemed the god of heaven because of their pains and their sores, and repented not of their deeds. 21 and moses stretched out his hand over the sea; and the lord caused the sea to go back by a strong east wind all that night, and made the sea dry land, and the waters were divided. 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: ## characterizing intertextuality between corpora our intertextuality measure is simply the cosine similarity of a pair of verse embeddings from a multilingual embedding model. for a given set of ground-truth references, we can also compute baseline similarities by randomly swapping one of the verses with another from the same chapter foot_2 . the ratio of the average intertextuality similarity to the average baseline similarity can be used to compare the degree of intertextuality across different sets of translations. intuitively, a ratio much larger than one (1) indicates strong intertextuality, whereas anything less than one indicates that supposedly intertextual verses are not more similar than random pairings. when comparing changes in intertextuality ratio across translation, we compute the 95% confidence interval via bootstrapping. specifically, we resample the original data with replacement 10,000 times, recalculating the ratio for each resample. to ground-truth references -or suspected references -and would likely be too crude a method to discover novel instances of intertextuality without extensive threshold tuning. instead, we use this measure to ascertain the degree of intertextuality within a set of texts known to be intertextual. we can then use this measurement to characterize changes in intertextuality across the same set of texts in translation. we compute intertextuality ratios for all original, human, and machine-translation texts, distinguishing the sets of references that are internal to a testament (within) and that cross between them (across). this distinction allows us to consider whether christian writing is particularly referential to the jewish testament, or if it became so through the effects of translation. christian theologians throughout history have often underscored the continuity of the christian and jewish testaments (van der waal, 1980), and human translators may have sought to emphasize this continuity in their translations. the full tables of these ratios can be found in ## analyzing intertextuality in translation the degree to which intertextuality is preserved is highest for the english translation and lowest for marathi. human translations consistently show higher levels of intertextuality. as suggested by @xcite , we indeed see that human translations over or underemphasize the intertextuality present in the text, whereas machine translations provide a neutral baseline, based on these results. we can look closer at the translation effects by sorting intertextual pairs according to the absolute shift in similarity. ## future work we plan to address the persistent issue of misalignment in parallel bible corpora. even in scholarly editions of digitized texts, misalignment is persistent. however, by applying the alignment methodology proposed by @xcite , we could unify alignment for research purposes. finally, we leave to future work exploring larger narrative contexts by examining narrative episodes instead of verse-level intertextuality.