The Odyssey, measured without mistaking measurement for judgment

Twenty-four translations, seen from the surface.

This analysis counts the visible words in every bundled translation and looks for recurring three-to-six-word formulas. It also places the same Greek forms beside aligned or estimated line windows, making changes in the surrounding wording visible without pretending that an automated window is a word-for-word alignment.

Companion piece: ten Greek words translators can’t agree on →

The corpus

All 24 Skald translations

Translation	Year	Language	Words	Vocabulary variety	Top ranked formula
A. T. Murray	1919	English	133,986	0.0429	“so he spoke and” (122×)
Samuel Butler	1900	English	117,938	0.0536	“the house of” (70×)
S. H. Butcher & A. Lang	1879	English	135,560	0.0449	“odysseus of many counsels” (66×)
Alexander Pope	1725	English	112,547	0.0734	“o er the” (151×)
William Cowper	1791	English	115,040	0.0727	“o er the” (51×)
George Chapman	1615	English	140,625	0.0600	“of all the” (67×)
Luis Segalá y Estalella	1910	Spanish	118,573	0.1032	“en el palacio” (114×)
Leconte de Lisle	1867	French	118,797	0.0684	“parla ainsi et” (210×)
Johann Heinrich Voß	1781	German	109,003	0.1061	“also sprach er” (175×)
Ian Johnston	2006	English	129,664	0.0521	“answered him and said” (80×)
William Cullen Bryant	1871	English	118,115	0.0587	“he spake and” (94×)
George Herbert Palmer	1884	English	116,728	0.0561	“the son of” (106×)
H. B. Cotterill	1911	English	145,162	0.0567	“all of the” (169×)
William Morris	1887	English	147,844	0.0432	“he spake and” (122×)
Philip Stanhope Worsley	1861	English	116,110	0.0691	“o er the” (73×)
Ippolito Pindemonte	1822	Italian	107,050	0.1341	“se non che” (21×)
Vasily Zhukovsky	1849	Russian	98,574	0.1861	“так он сказал” (79×)
Carel Vosmaer	1889	Dutch	128,485	0.0912	“alzoo sprak hij” (126×)
Christian Wilster	1837	Danish	122,876	0.0822	“saa han taled og” (58×)
Anne Dacier	1716	French	143,271	0.0695	“en même temps” (91×)
Shaul Tchernichovsky	1940	Modern Hebrew	85,572	0.2525	“אוֹדִיסֵס הָאִישׁ רַב” (118×)
Thomas Hobbes	1675	English	93,977	0.0629	“and to the” (35×)
Iakovos Polylas	1875	Modern Greek	103,091	0.1434	“ς το σπίτι” (136×)
Erland Lagerlöf	1908	Swedish	122,053	0.0904	“svarade då den” (118×)