Approaches for handling multilingualism in complex manuscript traditions: text alignment and advanced features in the DEDM project

The goal of this paper is to present the major theoretical challenges of the Digital Marco Polo (DEDM), an ongoing project developed at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice aiming at a critical reconstruction of the Devisement dou monde in an interactive frame. The thirteen most important versions of the tradition are taken into consideration, and a critical translation based on a new reconstruction hypothesis is provided. This project is the further development of Dei Viaggi di Messer Marco Polo [1], a digital edition on Ramusio’s edition of the Milione. On the website, a non-exhaustive bibliography on the tradition is available.