The Italian software of the Talmud – Panorama

For centuries, those who wished to read it was forced to do it secretly and with great risk.
Copies were blacklisted, often even burned in the streets.

Today is translated for the first time in Italian, thanks to a CNR software tailored to its outstanding features. This is the Babylonian Talmud , gigantic work written in the first centuries of the Christian era by masters who have passed on to subsequent generations Judaism for almost two thousand years.

A copy of the Treaty Rosh Hashanah (New Year), published by Giuntina , the first step in a complete translation project is delivered Tuesday, April 4, 2016 to the President of Sergio Mattarella Republic in a ceremony to ‘ Academy of Lincei in Rome.

the occasion is full of symbolic meanings, as the religious, historical and cultural heritage of this text.

However, there is also a technological aspect, because one of the reasons why the Talmud had not yet been translated into Italian (and has not been translated into many other languages) is its extraordinary complexity, made of continuous references between songs of different types: interpretations on the application of religious precepts of the Torah, first of all, but also rabbinical disputes, legal responses, historical chronicles, anecdotes, proverbs. In short, a “sea” of concepts and teachings, according to the definition which is given in Hebrew.

“Translating a work like that,” explains the director of the project Clelia Piperno , a lawyer at the University of Teramo “requires not only dozens of scholars working simultaneously on different parts. But also a common code that resolves in a uniform and consistent manner the many interpretive dilemmas posed by the original text. ” And that is where enters the field Cnr , or to be more precise the ‘ Computational Linguistic Institute (ILC) of Pisa, where a group of specialists has developed a new ad hoc program that can manage and harmonize the translations from the various scholars, almost all of the Italian language (including the chief Rabbi of Rome Riccardo Di Segni , president of the project) who have participated in this extraordinary linguistic adventure.

“the first function of our software,” says researcher ILC, Emiliano Giovannetti , which coordinates the technical “team is to allow each of the translators to be informed of the work carried out by the other, so as to take account of the linguistic solutions already taken to the songs that have common aspects with the one on which it is committed. When addressing a new song, the system suggests the translator what he learned on the basis of the work of colleagues. ” The software’s name is translate, even if it is not of course an automatic translator, but an ongoing support and highly sophisticated human minds working independently for the translation.

The beauty is that its capacity is refined as we proceed in the army of translators work, since each new translation inserted in the system increases the “Talmudic wisdom” to translate (hey you is already thinking about its use to translate into other languages ​​the same Talmud and possibly other religious texts not only Jewish). One method that seems made for the work of those rabbis of the period between the second and fifth centuries who spent his life to write down the traditions of the Talmud.

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