TransVis: Integrated Distant and Close Reading of Othello Translations

Studying variation among time-evolved translations is a valuable research area for cultural heritage. Understanding how and why translations vary reveals cultural, ideological, and even political influences on literature as well as author relations. In this article, we introduce a novel integrated visual application to support distant and close reading of a collection of Othello translations. We present a new interactive application that provides an alignment overview of all the translations and their correspondences in parallel with smooth zooming and panning capability to integrate distant and close reading within the same view. We provide a range of filtering and selection options to customize the alignment overview as well as focus on specific subsets. Selection and filtering are responsive to expert user preferences and update the analytical text metrics interactively. Also, we introduce a customized view for close reading which preserves the history of selections and the alignment overview state and enables backtracing and re-examining them. Finally, we present a new Term-Level Comparisons view (TLC) to compare and convey relative term weighting in the context of an alignment. Our visual design is guided by, used and evaluated by a domain expert specialist in German translations of Shakespeare.