Aligning Immanuel Kant’s Work and its Translations

This chapter discusses using CLARIN to edit Kant’s work and to consider how to align it with its translations, with special attention to Chinese. Kangde 康德 is the two-character phonetic loan that renders Kant’s name in Chinese. We have chosen Kangde 康德 as the name for our vision to express the challenge of setting up the new edition of the Druckschriften and their Chinese translation in the form of aligned corpora, thus opening up the way to further alignments with versions in other languages. From a philosophical-historical and cultural-political perspective, the chapter presents the idea of aligning two parallel corpora of around 1,580,000 German words and the corresponding characters in Chinese. The project is curiosity-driven and lays the foundations for investigating Kant’s philosophy and discussing it in a global context, a longterm effort that relies on the synergies among philosophy, computational linguistics, machine learning, translation studies, and China studies. The idea of the alignment is to offer unrivalled material for historical-philosophical investigations and serve as a viable infrastructure to be scaled up to other languages. To date, few aligned corpora exist that connect German and Chinese philosophical texts. The tools are not statistically implemented. As suggested by Franco Moretti’s notion of distant reading, experimentation on meaningful patterns in philosophical corpora is a step towards making new machine learning technologies usable for tackling issues in the humanities. Looking forward, we focus on the assumption that philosophers ought to explore new technologies to rethink conventional ways of interpreting texts in the humanities.