AI is the new trend here on the blogosphere….both pro and con….I have been mostly con because I am old and set in my ways. I have written about the dangers, as I see them, of depending on AI too heavily.
So when I recently read something that made me think of AI in a positive vain I felt I had to post it to be fair.
A group of researchers have made the translation of cuneiform possible….
Translation isn’t simply a matter of swapping one word for a corresponding word in another language. A high-quality translation requires the translator to understand how both languages string thoughts together and then use that knowledge to create a translation that maintains the linguistic nuances of the original, which native speakers effortlessly understand.
As difficult as that process is, it’s nothing compared to the challenge of translating an ancient language into a modern tongue. These translators must not only resurrect extinct languages from written sources but also have intimate knowledge of how the cultures that produced those sources evolved over centuries. If that weren’t enough, their sources are often fragmented, leaving crucial context lost to the ages.
Because of this, the number of people capable of translating languages from antiquity is small, and their best efforts are often outpaced by the volume of texts unearthed by archeologists.
Take ancient Akkadian. This early Semitic language is one of the best attested from the ancient world. Hundreds of thousands, by some accounts more than a million, Akkadian texts have been discovered and today lie in museums and universities. Many have even been digitized online. Each one has the potential to teach us about the life, politics, and beliefs of the first civilizations, yet this knowledge remains locked behind the time and manpower necessary to translate them.
To help change that, a multidisciplinary team of archaeologists and computer scientists has developed an artificial intelligence that can translate Akkadian almost instantly and unlock the historic record preserved in these 5,000-year-old tablets.
https://bigthink.com/the-future/ai-translates-cuneiform/
I believe this could be a boon for the history records….there is so much we do not know about this period of humanity that we might learn more about what it is to be human.
If this works out I shall tip my hat to AI for providing a valuable service to mankind.
I Read, I Write, You Know
“lego ergo scribo”