Why is this translation different from all other translations? A linguistic and cultural-historical analysis of English translations of the Passover Haggadah from 1770 to now

This diachronic investigation into the development of the English language translations of the traditional Ashkenazi Haggadah text (from the very first English translation in 1770 to the present day) makes use of a combination of distant reading and close reading techniques. Lexical, semantic, syntactic, orthographic, and grammatical shifts are identified and highlighted, and a cultural-historical background is provided to explain when and why these shifts occurred. 106 different English translations were made identified, digitized, and used as a corpus for this research. In addition, hard copies of both traditional and non-traditional English-language Haggadot were examined manually with close reading techniques, to identify trends to investigate further. This interdisciplinary study combines translation studies, linguistics, popular printing, Jewish history and culture, religious studies and liturgy, and digital humanities.