Computational Linguistics for Identifying the Vorlage or Anciently Translated Texts into Arabic. Presented
Digital Humanities Abu Dhabi DHAD ض
Abu Dhabi, 10-12 April 2017.

Language changes over time and varies according to place and social setting. In the case of Arabic, we can observe grammatical variation like differences in the structure of words, phrases, or sentences by comparing the same translated text taken from different manuscripts. One of the major problems that is standing in the way of studying the old Arabic translations is the original language from which the text has been taken and translated. This issue gains additional importance when the same text exists in more than one translation taken from multiple languages: Greek, Syriac, Coptic, and Latin… Accordingly, the Arabic translation of the text could have reached us from a previous translation taken from another language. This intervention seeks to present the methodology, which has been considered for a research project at the Digital Humanities Centre at Balamand University aiming at automating this process and enabling the researcher to follow the original language from which the old Arabic translations have been processed. This project offers automated linguistic corpus processing features. All transcribed texts are subject to a morphosyntactic annotation. Lexical, grammatical, and inflectional properties (tense, grammatical mood, grammatical voice, aspect, person, number, gender and case) are associated with the annotated text. These linguistic properties allow the system to perform complex searches based on abstract representations of a specific word, sentence, paragraph, syntax, and occurrence. Program