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Assyrian, Babylonian, Sumerian Translator Created

Posted by samzenpus on from the what-does-the-clay-tablet-say dept.

DrJackson writes "A new online translator that can translate Assyrian, Babylonian, Sumerian and Egyptian hieroglyphics (1 of the 3 types anyway) has been developed. This is the first time I ever saw a translator for cuneiform. Something like this would be great for translating interesting historical records like the Amarna Letters."

2 of 189 comments (clear)

  1. Uh...right. by piyamaradus · · Score: 5, Interesting

    As a technologist who also reads ancient Egyptian (from college) as well as Akkadian (== Assyrian & Babylonian, with slightly different scripts over the years) and Sumerian, I can fairly readily call shenanigans on this one. The sophistication of translation here is about as deep as the 'your name in hieroglyphs' stuff you find in museum stores and the horrid Dover reprints of Budge's books.

    And don't even get me started on Sumerian. Professional Sumerologists still can't render half of the agglutinative morphemes that appear in Sumerian verbs.

    1. Re:Uh...right. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I'll second that with the note that one should look at the sources that McCormack is using for his history of Sumer section. Citing Woolley is great, he is one of archeology's giants, but I must respectfully question drawing conclusions from Waddell for any language model / history. His model of hyperdiffusionism has been long discredited among scholars. I will also note the general lack of citation of recent scholarship in McCormack's pages or any recent work linguistic work by reputable scholars.
      One should point out that our understanding of Sumerian history and language, especially, has changed extensively since the 1930's.
      I think an online English -> Sumerian / Akkadian reference is a great idea. The EPSD from the University of Pennsylvania is a terrific reference along those lines, for example.
      That being said, even if the scholarship in the engine were sound, machine translation is also in its infancy for languages that we _fully_ understand, let alone Sumerian whose grammatical structure is highly debated among scholars.