Machine Translation for historical languages

During last years a lot of effort has been put in digitalisation of old manuscripts and making them available in form of digital libraries.

Most part of these libraries are available not only to researchers in a certain domain (classical philology, historians) but also to normal users. This raise new requirements to the functionalities offered by such digital libraries. Texts are written either in classical languages (ancient Greek, Latin) or in historic variants of nowadays language which cannot be understood as well by untrained people. The access of normal users to the content of these libraries can be really acquired only by providing translations.

While well-known manuscripts have been already translated in wide-spoken languages a great part of material remains unaccessible to the large foreign-language public.

Language technology, in particular machine translation have the potential to solve the above problem. We are looking for original contributions covering one of the following topics:

Papers in English language, no longer than 10 pages have to be sent in PDF format per e-mail no later than 10th April to cristina.vertanuni-hamburg.de with the mention "Workshop MT historical languages".

Accepted papers will be published in a workhop-proceedings volume. We encourage also System demonstrations as well as position papers and reports about work in progress.