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🤔 Alignment Principles

This document describes the alignment philosophy and structural decisions behind the Biblical section of the Parallelium corpus.
These principles guide how multilingual verses are paired, structured, and normalized across diverse traditions.

The alignment design emphasizes historical faithfulness, computational usability, and structural clarity, while remaining transparent about limitations and manual interventions.

🧭 Anchor Text

The Latin Vulgate serves as the primary alignment anchor due to its historical centrality and relatively stable verse structure.

  • When a Vulgate version is unavailable for a specific verse or book, alignment is still performed using available language pairs from other traditions.
  • In cases where a verse diverges (e.g., follows the Septuagint tradition), a modified reference is assigned (e.g., "3:03") to distinguish it from the Vulgate-based verse ("3:3"). This approach preserves valuable content without requiring a Latin version.

Example:

{
  "book": "nehemiae",
  "ref": "3:3",
  "data": {
    "la_vulgate": "portam autem Piscium aedificaverunt filii Asanaa ...",
    "gr_lxx": null,
    "en_wycliffe": "Forsothe the sones of Asamaa bildiden the yatis of fischis ...",
    "es_e6e8": "los fijos de assnaa fizieron la puerta delos peces ..."
  }
},
{
  "book": "nehemiae",
  "ref": "3:03",
  "data": {
    "la_vulgate": null,
    "gr_lxx": "καὶ τὴν πύλην τὴν ἰχθυηρὰν ᾠκοδόμησαν υἱοὶ Ασανα· ...",
    "en_coverdale": "But the Fyshporte dyd the children of Senaa buylde ...",
    "es_arragel": "& la puerta de los pesçes edeficaron los fiios de çanaa ..."
  }
}

🔗 Minimum Pairing Requirement

A verse is included only if it has at least one aligned counterpart in another language or tradition.

  • Books or verses that appear in only one tradition are excluded (e.g., IV Esdras in the Vulgate, 1 Esdras in the Septuagint, or 3–4 Maccabees in the Greek canon).
  • The dataset focuses strictly on comparative alignment between at least two witnesses.

🧱 Structural Exclusions

Books with major structural divergence are excluded when reliable verse mapping would require extensive manual effort.

  • Example: the Septuagint version of Esther differs significantly from the Vulgate and other witnesses, and was therefore excluded for now.

✋ Manual Alignment Adjustments

To maintain alignment consistency across divergent textual traditions, some verses required manual intervention, such as:

  • Splitting a verse across multiple references
  • Shifting a phrase to an adjacent verse to preserve structural correspondence

These interventions are based strictly on attested content — never on reconstruction or editorial invention.

All manual operations are documented separately to ensure transparency and reproducibility.