Digital Humanities Approach to Cultural Translation in Robert Southey’s Amadis of Gaul

This essay discusses the Amadis in Translation digital project (http://
amadis.newtfire.org), which applies TEI XML encoding to Robert
Southey’s 1806 translation Amadis of Gaul, comparing it to Southey’s
source, the 1547 Sevilla edition of Garci Rodríquez de Montalvo’s
Amadís de Gaula. The project uses computational methods to align the
source at the clause level rather than word-by-word, reflecting the
radical compressions and changes Southey made to the source. The
essay uses the alignment tables generated by the project to assess
Southey’s use of emotion in a set of sample chapters. Contrary to what
the aesthetics of the Romantic era might have led us to believe, the
data show that Southey dampened the use of emotion in the source
text, potentially for reasons of taste or national and cultural identity.
Our digital project illustrates how computational analysis of
translations can revise commonsense predictions about texts and make
comparisons between translations precise and quantifiable.