Translation Direction in the Gesta regum Sclavorum: A Quantitative and Qualitative Approach Dragana Kunčer 2026, Proceedings of the Second International Conference South Slavic Languages in the Digital Environment JuDig

https://www.academia.edu/180197913/Translation_Direction_in_the_Gesta_regum_Sclavorum_A_Quantitative_and_Qualitative_Approach The paper examines the claim that the Latin chronicle Gesta regum Sclavorum, a text concerning the medieval history of the South Slavs, was not originally composed in Latin but was translated from Italian into Latin as part of a deliberate forgery. The question of translation direction between the two versions is approached through quantitative, philological, and pragmatic analyses. The quantitative analysis is based on concepts such as translation universals, laws of translation, and translationese, according to which translated texts may be distinguished from texts originally composed in the target language by certain linguistic features. The hypotheses concerning the distinctive features of translated texts were operationalised for quantitative analysis. The analysis was performed on preprocessed versions of the two texts using Python scripts generated with the assistance of Chat-GPT from prompts designed for this purpose. The philological analysis was conducted through a manual comparison of the parallel texts. The pragmatic analysis was based on Ivan Lučić's comments on the content of the chronicle, as expressed both in his historiographical work De regno Dalmatiae et Croatiae libri sex and in letters to his friends. Lučić was the first editor of the Latin text and, according to the theory under examination, is presumed to have been its translator and one of the two figures responsible for the alleged forgery.