Each of the textual traditions involved has required to select a different allingment unity, in concordance with their discursive, typological and stylistic diversity.
For the notarial texts and the Fuero de Alcalá, the structure of the text itself provided the guidelines for this segmentation. In the case of the Aforismos, we have followed the numerical correspondence between the segments in different languages, while in the case of Romulo and Tarquinio we opted for a mixed type of segmentation: while trying to treat narrative segments as allignment units, we have also tried to reproduce the structure of the membratim prose of Malvezzi’s style.
The segmentation in Germania, Philotea and Gobernador cristiano has been made in a more aleatory way, since we just wanted to offer a very basic type of allignment that allowed a comparative reading of the texts. Obviously, this allignment could be modified in the future taking into account different sintactical and compositive structures.
It is important to not that the allignment of literary translations involves theoretical and practical problems much more complex than the ones we have discussed here, and which have already been solved in the case of modern administrative texts. The modus operandi of each translator creates, in the case of literary texts, an essencial difference, which explains why the allignment is easier in the case of texts that stay closer to the original, and grows in difficulty when the translation flows freely away from it.