Please see our conclusions page for interpretation of this data.
Table of Contents
- Word Count across Translations
- Sound Devices across Translations
- Figurative Language across Translations
- Tense across Translations
- Noun Case across Translations
Word Count across Translations
The Latin excerpts were noticeably shorter than the translations, such as the English, which was much longer than the Latin in every excerpt. This is especially noticeably in the line numbers of the translations (visible in our Comparison Tool), which emphasize that though these excerpts occur at the same place in the plot, some translations place them much further into the story in terms of length. For example, the excerpt from Book 4 spans lines 672-705 in Latin, but lines 1035-1093 in Spanish.
Sound Devices across Translations
Sound devices seemed to be much more common in the Latin than the translations. Only the English translation utilized anywhere near as many sound devices as the original Latin. The German translation used only sibilance, and very little at that.
Figurative Language across Translations
Asyndeton and synchysis were present only in the Latin version. All other kinds of figurative language tracked seemed to be fairly constant and equal throughout translations into at least one other language, except for the German translation which contained only one instance of polysndeton. The figurative language we tracked were:
- Anaphora: repetition of a word/phrase at the beginning of succesive clauses
- Asyndeton: omission or lack of conjunction
- Synchysis: intentional scattering of words in a sentence to create a sense of bewilderment or disruption
- Simile: comparison of different things, typically using "like" or "as"
- Polyptoton: usage of words derived from the same root in short succesion of each other
- Polysyndeton: excessive conjunction
- Metaphor: a symbol or story with an alternative and often abstract meaning
Notably, metaphor is excluded from the graph, as no instances of metaphor occurred during the chosen excerpts.
Tense Across Translations
We tracked eight different tenses, although only the first seven were present in the excerpts we studied. present and past were by far the most commonly used tenses, as the Latin Perfect tense translated into them, as well as into the Preterite tense in Spanish. Interestingly, there were notably more occurrences of the Future tense in Spanish, suggesting the translator may have altered the context and meaning of a scene or speech slightly.
- Preterite: the Spanish equivalent of a simple past tense
- Past: a simple tense for something that has already occurred
- Present: a simple current tense
- Imperfect: a continuous past tense, for something that occurred repeatedly or ongoingly in the past
- Perfect: the Latin equivalent of a simple past tense
- Pluperfect: an even further past; for something that occurred before an already specified past time
- Future: a tense for something which will occur
- Future Perfect: a tense for something which will have happened by a set point in the future
Noun Case Across Translations
This analysis only is relevant to Latin and German, as English and Spanish do not posess noun case. There is notably no ablative in German, although there is in Latin. This can perhaps account for the fact that there are more of every case in German than there are in the original Latin: perhaps ablative nouns were distributed across the different remaining cases in German.