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Assyrian, Babylonian, Sumerian Translator Created
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."
wake me when they can do pnakotic
Does it support UTF-8? :)
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.
Now I can finally find out what the capital of Assyria is! I hope its not "aaaarrrrhhhh"
"Something like this would be great for translating interesting historical records like the Amarna Letters."
God, I was just telling my friend Akakakakallatatatmah the exact same thing today! weird.
for the unfortunate translations of the Epic of Gilgamesh that rival the hilarity of the google translation of the japanese amazon site.
Machine translation sucks. Among other things, idioms, set phrases, wordplay, and most importantly the fact that there is rarely a one-to-one mapping between languages (often resulting in either a loss of information or requiring missing information to be added, which often requires knowledge of the culture of the language's people) all present challenges that make it unlikely that anything short of human-like AI (or very close) will be able to do good translations. Or to put it more briefly, "Nothing to see here. Please move along."
Zecharia Sitchin's money making scheme...
Read the article, then go to the web site. The web site translates FROM English TO the other languages. So there are no secrets revealed here. Unless you plan on revealing your personal secrets to someone from 3000 years ago by sending them through some sort of time machine.
.nosig
--
Will it translate casting liquified limestone correctly?
I swear, that was the funniest damn thing I've seen on slashdot.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
LOADING...
READY.
RUN
I've been meaning to write a 'Hello world' Nam-shub...
IMPORTANT, can somebody translate this for me, A.S.A.P.??
"Good evening. As a duly designated representative of the City, County, and State of New York, I order you to cease any, and all, supernatural activity and return forthwith to your place of origin, or to the nearest convenient parallel dimension."
You idiotic anonymous coward!
The Pnakotic Manuscripts were an invention of H.P. Lovecraft and factor into the Cthulhu Mythos. Besides, everyone knows the origin of Mankind lies within the information from the Elder Gods.
Did someone say Sumerian?
I hear they recently translated a speech by some Governor, addressing a San Francisco parade during a recent California primary election stop...
[...]
Candidate - Open immigration, mass transit, relief of property taxes at your doorstep, and windmills instead of coal.
Mayor - Wrong! Governor! What is best in life?
Governor - To brush your enemies, see them drivel before you, and to wear the garmentation of the women.
I hope, when they die, cartoon characters have to answer for their sins.
The whole page is total crap:
The Only thing the "translator" does is taking an English word and match it with lemmata in a lexicon then it takes the first hit and then it goes on. Try typing "I have seen you" you'll get "[I] [have] [see]n [you]" it simply cuts of the "n" of seen and leaves it there because it can only find uninflected forms. This is less than nothing.
And by the way the statement "For best results, use simple words as language has developed a lot since the time of this ancient language." under translation is one of the most stupid things I have read on an academic page language dedicated to some aspect of language. They should just take a Sanskrit dictionary (or whatever ... Maya ... Classical Chinese). Language then and now is pretty much the same, but apparently in some places technology hasn't developed that much, grumblegrumblegrumble...
"Hannibal's plans never work right. They just work." Amy/A-Team
...says the AC reading (and commenting on) Slashdot.
The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources. - Albert Einstein
"It says, 'bird, camel, Horus, snake, bundle of reeds!' "
I am a believer of momentum and curves.
Not really, but my gf's a language teacher and you wouldn't believe the amount of "homework" she gets which looks like a robot translated it from Hieroglyphics.
Some people just don't get it.
No sig today...
I tried a few basic phrases where I know (from graduate school) what the Akkadian should be. "If a man kills..." (shumma awilum idak, if I recall) from Hammurapi's Code. "For the gods" (ana ilani). "An adoption tablet" (tuppi maruti, all over the place especially in Nuzi tablets). Only a few words were represented correctly, and surely through the simplistic "this English word matches" method. I was shocked that even "kills" and "gods" were not rendered correctly. The script on the site tells me that terribly outdated sources were used. Tried the same for a few very simple Egyptian phrases. "The city is in joy" (all over the place in Gardiner, 3rd ed) (result not too bad on this one). "The priest hears the god". What? No flag (n-ch-r, sign for deity)? Few years ago I researched how to write out "God is Love" and "God loves you" (for Vacation Bible School, the theme was archeology-past), and I scoured Gardiner to make sure I got the grammar just right. Oh heck not even close - only correct part was mr for love, but should be mrwt for the noun. Don't get me on the Sumerian tests. Really disgustingly simple stuff from temple dedicatory inscriptions (I had just one semester of Sumerian). Well... got dingir for "god" but that's about it. Sorry. 10/10 for good intentions... but minus several million for the results. Sorry. 10/10 for good intentions... but minus several million for the results.
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
Hieroglyphs.
"Hieroglyphic" is an adjective. Is that so hard?
sic transit gloria mundi
Not yet, though they are on their way to being in the standard. As far as sumerian cuneiform, they are already in utf-8, part of the ancient languages section. ;-)
"One character encoding to rule them all."
What do you mean? I can speak fluently in several ancient languages. I happen to be an expert at COBOL.
You insensitive clod! All I wanted for Christmas was for Cthulhu to awaken and eat my boss. I didn't get it, and now you call Him a myth!
It doesn't even have a translation for "cheezburger", let alone "bukkit"...
This will be most useful in my efforts to summon Gozer!
I was kind of hoping it would be useful in getting the various tribes in Iraq talking to each other.
As a person who studied Latin at the high school and collegiate level, I know that much of what is 'worth' translating academically has already been translated by other academics. Sure, a scholar might be able to come up with his own unique translation, but that is not something that can be done by a machine.
A dear friend of mine is an Egyptologist, and I know his struggles in translating writings from different regions of the empire, let alone differences dynasty to dynasty.
Since even the best computer translators (and I mean the corporately deployed ones, not just freebie Web stuff like BabelFish) mangle all but the simplest Spanish, French and German (I can't say anything about Asian languages, as I can't speak or read any) phrases, how can we expect any level of reliability in translating languages that even leading scholars struggle with?
Besides, the most difficult part of translating anything stems from the fact that any person seldom speaks or writes as he should. The rules of language are bent, twisted and altered into regional dialects and strings of ethnic and cultural phraseology. In the Spanish language, a word may take on one meaning in Mexico, and entirely another in Spain. Nevermind the fact that, at least in my experience, Spanish Spanish is significantly different from Mexican Spanish. And those are two languages that diverged only a matter of hundreds of years ago, as opposed to the thousands often seen in dead languages.
This is very interesting to me, but until we have widely-available computers that can understand the subtle nuances of tone, inflection, humor and colloquialisms, the computer translation will never best, or even come close to a careful academic translation, or a translation done by a human fluent in both languages, if not academically trained in both languages.
Message contains 1 attachment: spam.gif
Bird bird eye feather snake bird squiggly, you insensitive clod!
in my everyday life. Now if they one day invent one that can translate nonsense english into real english I'd be in heaven.
Cool idea though. Wonder if it works, all my texts are in living langaguges. STDK
Actually, that makes me wonder about an extra technical aspect. AFAIK, writing in Egypt wasn't left to right, same size. They sometimes wrote left to right (with the faces of the hieroglyphs pointing that way), sometimes right to left (ditto), sometimes vertically, and, here's the kicker, sometimes just turned it all into a sort of a painting. I.e., sometimes the symbols were rearranged, and some some made bigger, some smaller, to get an aesthetic picture.
So I'm really curious how they'd help a totally clueless guy like me input the last case.
Not saying it can't be done, so hold your horses with the "OMG be sure they already thought of everything" posts, folks. Just asking how. Would I be able to just run it through a scanner and upload the image? If I was smart and learned enough to figure it out on my own, which is kinda a pre-requisite to inputting it then with a keyboard, I wouldn't need an online translator.
Also, would they include a dictionary of the common phrases, metaphors, etc? Remember, I'm a guy who can't even read it (or I wouldn't need an online translator), so any cultural references would go even higher over my head.
E.g., AFAIK, 110 being a perfect number in their numerology, it also ended up the perfect lifespan of a human, so phrases like "he lived 110 years" were a metaphor for "he was a perfect guy" (or really really liked, at least) or "he lived a perfect life." You can find that kind of stuff about people who actually died in their 30's (which was actually the peak of the gauss curve for males in the Old Kingdom, so 110 would have been an _extreme_ improbability) or 40's.
E.g., some addressed letters "to your scribe" or complimented said scribe, which would seem a bit bizarre. That is, unless you figure out it was a fancy way of saying "I know you can read and write, and you're reading this yourself, as opposed to having a scribe read it to you", which, apparently, was something appreciated.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I translate all my witnesses with the aid of google. It works large! I do not see that what the problem is. Nobody can dreaming that I am using a translator less that says they.
Badgers, we don't need no stinking badgers! - UHF
You were right in expecting gibberish, just read here for example: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archive s/004867.html
Hey, do you want to try some snowcrash?
1 11001001100001011010010110111000100111011100110010 00000110011001110101011000110110101101100101011001 00001000000111010101110000001000000110111001101111 01110111001011000010000001001000010000010010000001 0010000100000100100000010010000100000100100001
0111100101101111011101010111001000100000011000100
I knew someone would have to translate it. :) ... its like waving a red rag in front of a bull ;)
There are 10 kinds of people in the world... those who understand binary and those who don't.