• computational linguistics
• translation studies
• classical reception
• stylometry
• machine translation
• distributional semantics

The aim of this work is both to build a program which automatically aligns the original
Homeric poems with the Italian translations of them - literary and free translations included –
produced over a span of time that goes from the XVIII to the XXI century and to show what
kind of analysis this alignments could allow.
Through time, translations have changed trying at the same time to respect the text and to
adapt to the aesthetic paradigms of the epoch they belonged to and of the translator himself.

After a brief history of Italian translations of Homer, where I give a chronological account of the principal Italian translations of the Homeric poems between the XIV and the XXI centuries, I develop the two main parts of my work. In Part I, I explain the working principles of the textual aligner. After a summary of the state of the art in textual alignment in section 1.1 and an explanation of the reasons that drove me to chose proper names as anchor words (section 1.2), I proceed to give a detailed explanation of the program's mechanics in three sections. In section 2.1 I give an overview of the algorithm in its main steps; in section 2.2 I explain in detail how the text is segmented and how the anchor words are extracted and paired; in section 2.3 I summarize the principles of the Needlemann-Wunsch algorithm; in section 2.4 I explain the mechanisms of the post-processing phase, where the alignment results are refined and enhanced. Some examples of the behavior of the aligner on different kind of translations are given in section 2.5. Section 2.6 gives a very brief account on the performance of the aligner for translations in different European languages.
Part II is devoted to the analysis of Italian translations of Homer. Sections 3.1 and 3.2 supply the state of the art and an explanation of the fundamental principles of distributional semantics. To analyze Italian translations, I chose a set of Ancient Greek terms and a set of their Italian translations and I studied the similarity of those terms both in the Ancient Greek and Italian texts. Section 4.1 presents the selected terms and explains how the Ancient Greek words were chosen. To find their most diffused Italian counterparts I used both manual inspection and a method of automatic extraction to which section 4.2 is dedicated. Chapter 5 shows the results of such analysis: section 5.1 discusses some quantitative aspects of Italian translations as the average period length or the semantic distance, and section 5.2 considers in detail the distributional similarities between the selected words in Ancient Greek and Italian texts. Finally, sections 5.3 and 5.4 examine some polysemy issues related to translation as the ways various multivocal words present in Homer were translated over time.