Machine Translation for Historical Research: A Case Study of Aramaic-Ancient Hebrew Translations

Result code in IS VaVaI

<a href="https://www.isvavai.cz/riv?ss=detail&h=RIV%2F00216208%3A11320%2F25%3AD9LZB4LB" target="_blank" >RIV/00216208:11320/25:D9LZB4LB - isvavai.cz</a>

Result on the web

<a href="https://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?eid=2-s2.0-85191791166&doi=10.1145%2f3627168&partnerID=40&md5=5b1fe0c881b8fe08bf97e05c2473b5f7" target="_blank" >https://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?eid=2-s2.0-85191791166&doi=10.1145%2f3627168&partnerID=40&md5=5b1fe0c881b8fe08bf97e05c2473b5f7</a>

DOI - Digital Object Identifier

<a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3627168" target="_blank" >10.1145/3627168</a>

Result language

angličtina

Original language name

Machine Translation for Historical Research: A Case Study of Aramaic-Ancient Hebrew Translations

Original language description

In this article, by the ability to translate Aramaic to another spoken languages, we investigated machine translation in a cultural heritage domain for two primary purposes: evaluating the quality of ancient translations and preserving Aramaic (an endangered language). First, we detailed the construction of a publicly available Biblical parallel Aramaic-Hebrew corpus based on two ancient (early 2nd to late 4th century) Hebrew-Aramaic translations: Targum Onkelus and Targum Jonathan. Then using the statistical machine translation approach, which in our use case significantly outperforms neural machine translation, we validated the excepted high quality of the translations. The trained model failed to translate Aramaic texts of other dialects. However, when we trained the same statistical machine translation model on another Aramaic-Hebrew corpus of a different dialect (Zohar, 13th century), a very high translation score was achieved. We examined an additional important cultural heritage source of Aramaic texts, the Babylonian Talmud (early 3rd to late 5th century). Since we do not have a parallel Aramaic-Hebrew corpus of the Talmud, we used the model trained on the Bible corpus for translation. We performed an analysis of the results and suggest some potential promising future research. Copyright © 2024 held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM.

Czech name

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Czech description

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Type

J_SC - Article in a specialist periodical, which is included in the SCOPUS database

CEP classification

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OECD FORD branch

10201 - Computer sciences, information science, bioinformathics (hardware development to be 2.2, social aspect to be 5.8)

Project

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Continuities

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Publication year

2024

Confidentiality

S - Úplné a pravdivé údaje o projektu nepodléhají ochraně podle zvláštních právních předpisů

Name of the periodical

Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage

ISSN

1556-4673

e-ISSN

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Volume of the periodical

17

Issue of the periodical within the volume

2

Country of publishing house

US - UNITED STATES

Number of pages

23

Pages from-to

1-23

UT code for WoS article

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EID of the result in the Scopus database

2-s2.0-85191791166