Communications of the ACM
Italians, Helped By an App, Translate the Talmud
After five years of labor by dozens of scholars, linguists, philologists, and editors, as well as a crew of computer scientists and researchers, a state-funded Project Talmud presented the first volume of the first-ever Italian translation.
Credit: Credit Librado Romero/The New York Times
The first-ever Italian translation of the Babylonian Talmud has been completed after five years of work by an army of scholars, linguists, philologists, editors, and computer scientists.
The completion of "Project Talmud" was celebrated at a presentation at the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei by Riccardo Di Segni, Rome's chief rabbi and chairman of the translation committee. "There is now a group of scholars of the Talmud that speak the Italian language," he notes. "These pages are now part of Italian history."
The Babylonian Talmud encompasses 5,422 pages written in Hebrew and Aramaic.
Funding for Project Talmud was provided by Italy's national government, and participating in the project were the Ministry of Education and the Italian Jewish community. Project director and professor Clelia Piperno put together the team of experts that handled the translation. "We were 12 at first, now we're more than 80," Piperno says.
A collaborative Web application from the National Research Council's Institute for Computational Linguistics enabled dozens of translators to translate the Talmud concurrently. The "Traduco" app, which means "I translate" in Italian, supports translation of ancient texts using a multidisciplinary strategy that merges software engineering and computational linguistics.
Emiliano Giovannetti with the institute's research unit says the project required an interpretive translation with explicative integrations.
From The New York Times
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