The main aim of the project is a corpus-based text genetic and historical linguistic investigation of the Old Lithuanian Lutheran postils (pericopic) and their Latin as well as German (in) sources of translation, and presentation as a new type of digital edition. This is an interdisciplinary project in which historical linguistics (Baltic studies) cooperates with computer science (computational linguistics). The project consists of several highly interrelated tasks in both disciplines.

The main philological tasks are: (1) identification of the design principles and translation strategies of the Lithuanian texts, (2) determining the intra- and intertextual references of the postils, and (3) the linguistic-historical interpretation of their contents in the form of a linguistically deeply annotated reference corpus.

The main computer scientific tasks are: (1) the detection of intra- and intertextual references as well as the alignment with the so-identified originals using machine translation, which will be advanced through the project, (2) the modeling as a graph (and), as well as the graphical representation of these structures as an interactive visualization, and (3) the implementation of a platform to make the research results searchable, traversable and generally accessible.

Funded since 2021

Project identifier:  Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 443985248