Bilingual searching allows readers to search for terms in one language and then see their translation equivalents in the other. In Beyond Translation 1.0, users can explore this function by searching Greek words in the Iliad and Odyssey and seeing how they are translated. This method allows those with no training in the language to begin to see how words are used in context and thus to explore what they truly mean.
The example illustrates the method and its potential with a search for the Greek word, mênis, which is conventionally translated as “wrath” or “anger.”
Figure 1: Example search for Beyond Translation.
In Homeric Greek, this noun is applied to the anger of Achilles and of gods. The choice of this as the first word of the Iliad may thus immediately introduce the superhuman and almost divine status that Achilles will enjoy. The bilingual search allows readers to discover for themselves the fact that this word applies to Achilles and to gods. Students in small groups almost always (in my experience) see this association for themselves.
Click on the first word of the Iliad (“μῆνιν“) and scroll through the right hand column until you see “Lemma Occurrences“:
Figure 3: Examine the lemmatized search for all forms of the selected words in the Iliad and Odyssey.
You can now view the next occurrence of a form of the word by clicking on Il. 1.75.
Figure 4: Examine the context of the next instance of the current word (“μῆνις“).
What has not been implemented in Perseus 6.0
Perseus 6.0 is not just a demo because it does allow you to do some serious work if you are focusing on the Iliad and the Odyssey, but it is only a first step. Things you cannot yet do include:
You can only do bilingual searching for the Iliad and the Odyssey. We hope soon to have this function generalized so that you can search for any text where we have a translation and lemmatization.
You can search for Greek words but not for English words. Searching the English is not difficult but it has not yet been a top priority.
You can only search for a word that you can see in the passage in front of you. We need to add a query box that lets you select the words you want to search.
The Homeric bilingual search works relatively well because I semi-automatically aligned each sentence in the Greek treebank with a sentence in an English translation. Without such manual sentence alignments, we can provide larger chunks of English to make sure we have the right passage or we can use automatic Greek-English word alignment to provide a more focused chunk of English. For prose authors, we can align texts at the book/chapter/section level but sentence alignment can greatly improve this: the average section in Xenophon’s Anabasis contains 75 Greek words. The average sentence (as defined in its treebank) contains 25 Greek words.
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