That branch of the Lake of Como...: Developing a New Resource for the Analysis of I Promessi Sposi and its Historical Translations

This paper presents a directional parallel corpus of the Ventisettana, that is the version of I Promessi Sposi published by Manzoni in 1827, aligned at sentence level with the anonymous English translation published in London in 1834 by Richard Bentley. After describing the procedure followed for creating the resource and analyzing the results of the manual alignment, the corpus is used as a gold standard to evaluate Bertalign automatic aligner. This new linguistic resource can benefit the research community, in particular in the fields of the history of literature and translation studies, and be useful for developing new automatic tools specific for handling the peculiarities of historical literary texts.