Readability across Time and Languages: The Case of Matthew’s Gospel Translations

We have studied how the readability of a text can change in translation by considering Matthew’s Gospel, written in Greek, translated into Latin and 35 modern languages. We have found that the deep-language parameters CP (characters per word), PF (words per sentence), IP (words per interpunctions), MF (interpunctions per sentence) and a universal readability index GU of each translation are so diverse from language to language, and even within a given language for which there are many versions of Matthew—such as in English and Spanish—that the resulting texts mathematically seem to be diverse. The several tens of versions of Matthew’s Gospel studied appear to address very diverse audiences. If a reader could understand all of them well, he/she would have the impression of reading texts written by diverse authors, although all of them tell the same story.