Interpreting Women: Gendered Narratives in English Translations of Homer’s Odyssey

I really wanted to work on a project that combined both my undergrad and grad school courses. During my undergrad, my Classics professors taught us to always read into the bias of the author of any work whether primary or secondary. I am by no means an expert at translating Ancient Greek, but I still have an intermediate understanding of this dead language, enough so that I can understand when an English translator has taken too much creative liberty in their adaptation of a Greco-Roman work.

Perhaps I view certain characters in the Odyssey differently than others due to my bias as a woman, but I still wanted to create a text analysis project from big data that I gathered and cleaned and organized myself in order to see whether or not there were clearly discernable differences between 10 English male translators of the Odyssey and the only published female English translator.

The project is available in a Spyral Notebook here.

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