Editing Babylon: representing multilingualism in TEI.

In a recent discussion on the TEI mailing list, the issue of multilingualism in documents represented in TEI was brought up. The post by Till Grallert focused on the question of bibliographic representation of a bilingual magazine in which none of the two used languages was the “main” or the “secondary”. This indicates that multilingualism is an up-and-coming topic for the “next gen” of digital editors.

In the project which inspires this poster, the question of multilinguality is equally significant, but takes a different form. In the digital edition of the notebooks of the Austrian literature Nobel laureate Peter Handke, the sources’ main or primary language is German. However, due to frequent “code switching” (Gramling 2017) multiple other languages can be found in the notebooks as well. Among them are French, English, Slovene, Ancient Greek, Latin and others. These languages appear when the author notes vocabulary that he is memorizing or quotes from literature, music, and other artworks, but also when he integrates individual terms in other languages into his otherwise German note taking. Handke notes terms and quotes partly with and partly without translations to German; in some cases, he notes terms in other languages together with synonyms in that language, but without translation to German. Sometimes, his noted translations to German are wrong.

Currently, the encoding strategy for representing Handke’s multilingual note taking practice in the digital edition at hand is being developed. The poster introduces the project, and shows and defends the chosen encoding solution by showcasing the various manifestations of multilingualism in Handke's notebooks.