Graecum-Arabicum-Latinum Encoded Corpus (GALEN©)
Usama Gad (Heidelberg)
Digital Classicist London & Institute of Classical Studies seminar 2015
Friday August 7th at 16:30, in Room G21A, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU
Livecast at Digital Classicist London YouTube channel.
I- What is GALEN© ?
GALEN© is a long-term project to produce the first (aligned and treebanked) comprehensive digital corpus of translations between Greek, Arabic and Latin. The corpus seeks not only to include the medieval translations of science and philosophy from Greek into Arabic (8th- 10th Century AD) and again from Arabic into Latin (11th -13th Century AD), but also to comprise the modern translations of Greek and Latin literature into Arabic (19th-21th Century AD), which is not in copyright. It is a system because it seeks; first, to produce guidelines and standards for the digital translations between these languages, second, to train every interested scholar (competent of these three languages or at least two of them) in producing open access digital editions with translations to the works not already translated in a printed form, third, to analyze this corpus philologically, linguistically, historically, socially etc., fourth, to investigate the under-researched topic of Greek and Latin translations’ movement and their social and cultural impact upon the Arabic societies’ past, present and future, and fifth, to support an interdisciplinary researchenvironment of scholars from cultural backgrounds that are not always in good terms with one another. From its very beginning the corpus along with its interdisciplinary research papers will be available online for the international scholarly community under the open access license CC BYSA.
II- How this GALEN© corpus will be produced?
The collaborative editing platform Perseids will be used to produce these digital, aligned and treebanked translations of already available and open-access texts, while the texts, still in printed form (and not in copyright) will be converted into the proper format to be ready for further digital processing. First, the material already available through “A Digital Corpus for Graeco- Arabic Studies” will be the first sample of this work. These are some of the medieval translation of science and philosophy into Arabic. The segmentation of this small corpus and arranging of its workflow will be the first step in this regard, then through the cooperation, recruiting, and training of academic staff and researchers from all over the world, this task will be ultimately achieved within reasonable budget and time. Second, the modern translations of Greek and Latin into Arabic that were surveyed and identified in the blog “Classics in Arabic” as “not in copyright”, will be digitally processed and added to this corpus. Third, the last thread here will be the training of modern translator (between these languages i.e. Greek, Latin and Arabic) to produce their editions digitally.
ALL WELCOME
The seminar will be followed by wine and refreshments.