The presentation outlines a computational text analysis study conducted on a bilingual corpus of historical 19th century French administrative documents and their Greek translations. The primary objective is to apply digital humanities methodologies and natural language processing (NLP) techniques to uncover linguistic patterns, historical context, and thematic structures within these archival sources.
The approach integrates exploratory and statistical analysis of the historical texts. By calculating word frequencies and applying the Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) algorithm, the study maps the core vocabulary of the corpus. Furthermore, it examines n-grams, specifically bigrams and trigrams, to detect recurring, formulaic expressions typical of 19th century administrative language. This analysis leverages distant reading frameworks, Named Entity Recognition (NER), and specialized digital text analysis tools including Textométrie and Voyant Tools.
Additionally, a detailed concordance analysis is conducted using corpus linguistics software such as AntConc. This process examines how specific keywords function within their precise historical and administrative context. This comparative approach reveals how terminology is deployed and maintained across both the source French texts and their translations.
Advanced topic modeling using BERTopic is also implemented. This technique applies document embeddings to automatically cluster the historical administrative texts into coherent thematic categories based on semantic similarity.
Ultimately, this multi-layered computational framework offers a rigorous methodology for analyzing historical administrative discourse, providing deep insights into translation consistency, the stylistic conventions of the era, and the thematic architecture of the text.
Foteini Karlafti-Mouratidi is an assistant professor in the Department of Foreign Languages, Translation and Interpreting, School of Human Sciences, of the Ionian University. She graduated from the School of Philosophy of the University of Athens (Department of Classic Philology), as well as from the School of French of the same University. She did postgraduate studies at the University of Paris I-Panthéon-Sorbonne. She is a Ph.D. in Economical History of the University of Paris I-Panthéon-Sorbonne, Sciences Économiques-Sciences Humaines-Sciences Juridiques et Politiques. By 2010, she was a Teaching Associate of the Department of Foreign Languages, Translation and Interpreting of the Ionian University and by 2017 she was a Laboratory Teaching Staff of the same Department. She has taught and teaches: Translation of economic, legal and political texts (French-Greek, Greek-French), Legal History, Labour History and Labour Relations, France: Country and Civilization, European History, Legal Acts, French Literature and the postgraduate course: Political Discourse Analysis and Ancient Greek and Roman Rhetoric. She is a founding member of the Laboratory "Language, History and Civilization of the Ionian Islands" and scientific responsible of the (double-blind peer review) Journal "Heptanisos Politeia" in the same Laboratory and Department. She is the writer of six books, the two in french language. She has held lectures, she has participated in many conferences and has published a lot of papers in scientific journals. Her research fields are in the Economical History, Labour History, History of Law, Economical-Legal and Political Translation and History of Institutions.
