Cited: Reuters
The beginning of August, one man, Kevin Knight, was awarded $1.6 million to develop come computational tools to analyze now unreadable written texts from antiquity by the National Science Foundation. Knight is a senior research scientist in the Information Science Institutes as well as a research associate professor at USC in the school’s Department of Computer Science. He will be working with Regina Barzilay of MIT’s Computer Science Artificial Intelligence Lab. The project is called DECIPHER and it is intended to decipher ancient texts using computers and training automated language translation systems without using parallel texts
According to the proposal for the work, “Computational analysis of ancient scripts offers a better understanding of ancient cultures, and unsupervised techniques construct language connections of great interest to historical linguists.
“Applying such techniques to automated language translation offers the chance to bring many more language pairs and domains to the population at large.”
It seems that researchers in Israel have developed a computer program that can decipher previously unreadable ancient texts and possibly lead the way to a Google-like search engine for historical documents. The program uses pattern recognition algorithms similar to those law enforcement agencies have adopted to identify and compare fingerprints. In this case, the program identifies letters, words and even handwriting styles, saving historians and liturgists hours of sitting and studying each manuscript.
“The more texts the program analyses, the smarter and more accurate it gets,” Bar-Yosef said.
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The computer works with digital copies of the texts, assigning number values to each pixel of writing depending on how dark it is. It separates the 
writing from the background and then identifies individual lines, letters and words. It also analyses the handwriting and writing style, so it can “fill in the blanks” of smeared or faded characters that are otherwise indiscernible, Bar-Yosef said. The team has focused their work on ancient Hebrew texts, but they say it can be used with other languages, as well.
The team published its work, which is being further developed, most recently in the academic journal Pattern Recognition due out in December but already available online. A program for all academics could be ready in two years, Bar-Yosef said. And as libraries across the world move to digitize their collections, they say the program can drive an engine to search instantaneously any digital database of handwritten documents.
Uri Ehrlich, an expert in ancient prayer texts who works with Bar-Yosef’s team of computer scientists, said that with the help of the program, years of research could be done within a matter of minutes.
“When enough texts have been digitized, it will manage to combine fragments of books that have been scattered all over the world,” Ehrlich said.
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My Take: I just wonder how accurate the translations are going to be with this computer program. One thing is definitely for sure, it will not make guesses like man does. Men have been translating various books from one language into other languages and if they did know what they were reading, they would make a guess. This has led to a lot of confusion about many things that happened in the past.
This advancement could be compared to Los Angeles CD duplication. What I mean is, at one time it would take hours to duplicate a CD or even make a DVD copy. Now you can get a CD duplication in just a few minutes. In comparison, at one time, it took months or years to translate ancient texts and now in just a few minutes or hours it will be translated by a computer program.
Seriously though, how accurate can the translations be? These professors and translators are still not sure what some of the language means. In fact, some of these people even argue about the meaning of some words and phrases. Maybe if the program is done correctly, it can extrapolate what man has missed into an accurate translation. Who knows?
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