About the Project

Out of the world’s 6000+ languages only a small fraction currently enjoys the benefits of modern information technologies. Languages and cultures left behind are called endangered, indigenous, or technologically low-resourced. ROSETTA is a collaborative and interdisciplinary digital humanities research project, between Stanford University and the Université de Lille and funded by the France-Stanford Center for Interdisciplinary Studies. It aims to preserve and sustain knowledge diversity and cultural heritage by combining different disciplines: Information and Communication Science, Computational Linguistics, American Literature, and Translation Studies. Much as the Rosetta stone helped decipher the demotic and hieroglyphic scripts thanks to the presence of the Greek translation, our project intends to preserve contemporary endangered languages and cultures and assist with their survival through existing transnational translated texts.

ROSETTA makes use of extant translated versions of a single text into a number of endangered and low-resourced languages. The project relies on crowdsourcing approaches as well as inclusive, interactive and collaborative user-based approaches for data and information collection. Natural Language Processing methods are then used to generate multilingual knowledge and language resources (corpora, thesauri, dictionaries, etc). We hope that eventually, during their contribution and exploration, users and scholars will have a contextualized overview about the intercultural and global circulation of a transnational text through an interactive global knowledge map.

A first experiment of ROSETTA uses extant translated versions of a single fictional text — Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn — into a number of low-resourced languages spanning a period of nearly a century and a half. In the process, users and scholars will have the opportunity to gain insight into the global circulation of a transnational American novel.

"Global Huck” is a literary and cultural historical project out of which ROSETTA grew, and it involves identifying global editions of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and having scholars contribute comments about the cultural work that each translation does in specific cultural contexts.

The project has been supported by Maison des Sciences de l’Homme et de la Société de Lille (MESHS) and is currently supported by Huma-Num, a very large research infrastructure for facilitating the digitization of research in the humanities and social sciences funded by the European Commission. At the heart of the SHS and digital humanities, Huma-Num is built on an original organization consisting of implementing a human (collective consultation) and technological (sustainable digital services) system on a national and European scale.

Please contribute information about editions on the map or any other editions here. The form accepts all alphabets and languages. We welcome all kinds of information about these translations: citations to editions, links to them, PDFs, images, bibliographic records, as well as citations to and links to scholarship about the translations.