![]() The A.I.’s skill at the two translation types of translation scored 36.52 and 37.47, respectively, on the Best Bilingual Evaluation Understudy 4 (BLEU4), a measure of translation quality. can perform two types of translation-translating cuneiform to English, and transliterating cuneiform (rewriting it phonetically). “Yet, most of these documents remain untranslated and inaccessible due to their sheer number and limited quantity of experts able to read them.” “Hundreds of thousands of clay tablets inscribed in the cuneiform script document the political, social, economic, and scientific history of ancient Mesopotamia,” the team wrote. into the cuneiform interpretation process. But that could change with the integration of A.I. Right now, the number of existing tablets and the rate of new tablets being excavated by archaeologists outpace linguists’ translation efforts. This means that troves of knowledge on the significant early civilization, sometimes considered the first empire in history, are completely untapped. The number of existing cuneiform texts is overwhelming compared to the small number of linguists who are able to translate Akkadian. Translating a text while preserving its original tone, cadence, and even humor is a delicate craft-and an incredibly difficult one when the language’s culture is largely unknown. High-quality translation requires a deep knowledge of both languages’ structures, their surrounding cultures, and the histories that anchor those cultures. But many times, a statement in one language doesn’t have an exact or easy equivalent in another, accounting for cultural nuance and difference in the languages’ construction. Translation is often misunderstood as a one-to-one decryption of a foreign word or phrase. Hundreds of thousands of these tablets, due to the durability of their material, have weathered the centuries and now populate the halls of various universities and museums. Akkadians typically wrote by marking a clay tablet with the wedge-shaped end of a reed (cuneiform literally means “wedge shaped” in Latin). Its cuneiform writing system used an alphabet of sharp, intersecting triangular figures. The tongue of the Akkadian Empire, located in present-day Iraq during the 24th to 22nd centuries BCE, Akkadian existed as both a spoken and written language. In translating dead languages, especially those with no descendant languages, piecing together meaning without a wealth of cultural context can be like traveling without a North Star. The team, led by a Google software engineer and an Assyriologist from Ariel University, trained the model on existing cuneiform translations using the same technology that powers Google Translate. model to instantly translate the ancient glyphs. ![]() tool can decode them within seconds.Īn interdisciplinary group of computer science and history researchers published a journal article in May describing how they had created an A.I. There are so few people who can read the extinct language that nearly a million Akkadian texts still haven't been translated to date-but now an A.I. Consider Akkadian cuneiform, one of the world’s oldest written languages. When techno-optimists talk about the game-changing potential of A.I., they cite difficult problems like this, and even for languages that have already been translated, challenges remain. And it took over 3,000 years to reveal Linear B, the earliest form of Greek. It took nearly two centuries to understand Mayan glyphs. It took 23 years to crack the Egyptian hieroglyphics on the Rosetta Stone. Dead languages are famously hard to decipher.
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