From Pattern to Interpretation. Using Colibri Core to Detect Translation Patterns in the Peshitta.

Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2022), pages 4270–4274 Marseille, 20-25 June 2022 © European Language Resources Association (ELRA), licensed under CC-BY-NC-4.0 4270 From Pattern to Interpretation. Using Colibri Core to Detect Translation Patterns in the Peshitta. Mathias Coeckelbergs Universit´e libre de Bruxelles Franklin Rooseveltlaan 50, 1050 Brussels Mathias.Coeckelbergs@ulb.be Abstract This article presents the first results of the CLARIAH-funded project ‘Patterns in Translation: Using Colibri Core for the Syriac Bible’ (PaTraCoSy). This project seeks to use Colibri Core to detect translation patterns in the Peshitta, the Syriac translation of the Hebrew Bible. We first describe how we constructed word and phrase alignment between these two texts. This step is necessary to successfully implement the functionalities of Colibri Core. After this, we further describe our first investigations with the software. We describe how we use the built-in pattern modeller to detect n-gram and skipgram patterns in both Hebrew and Syriac texts. Colibri Core does not allow the creation of a bilingual model, which is why we compare the separate models. After a presentation of a few general insights on the overall translation behaviour of the Peshitta, we delve deeper into the concrete patterns we can detect by the n-gram/skipgram analysis. We provide multiple examples from the book of Genesis, a book which has been treated broadly in scholarly research into the Syriac translation, but which also appears to have interesting features based on our Colibri Core research. Keywords: Colibri Core, Translation Patterns, Syriac 1. Introduction To what extent can linguistically uninformed features help us in tracing divergent patterns in an ancient Syr- iac Bible translation (the Peshitta, 2nd cent. AD) and its Hebrew source text? To answer this question, we need a language-independent tool that allows for a fine- grained comparison of both texts, without the need of textual annotations. The CLARIAH component Col- ibri Core, which has been applied in translation stud- ies before, is very promising in this respect. This arti- cle summarizes the first results of the PaTraCoSy (PAt- terns in TRAnslation: Using COlibri Core for the He- brew Bible corpus and its SYriac translation) project, which is funded by CLARIAH. The overall goal of this project is to use the Colibri Core environment to detect translation patterns between the Hebrew Bible and the Peshitta, its Syriac translation, thus providing a follow-up of the CLARIAH research pilot Linking Syr- iac Data. The richly annotated linguistic database of the Hebrew Bible has been created over a period of al- most four decades (1977–2017). Thanks to a CLARIN- NL project (2013–2014), it has been made available through the SHEBANQ website, besides its presence on GitHub as the BHSA. An electronic representation of the ancient Syriac translation of this text, called the Peshitta is also produced and maintained by the Eep Talstra Centre for Bible and Computer (ETCBC). Mod- ifications of this corpus were made in the CLARIAH research pilot Linking Syriac Data (2017–2018). Some encoded texts (Kings, Psalms 1–30 and others) are lin- guistically annotated …

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