![]() Perhaps the most dramatic story of decipherment is that of the Maya script, which involved two opposing points of view amplified by Cold War tensions. ![]() Today, statistical machine translation engines are generated in a similar fashion, using parallel texts as “virtual Rosetta Stones.” If, however, a parallel text is not available, the decipherment relies on closely related languages or whatever cues can be applied. The classic Rosetta Stone story is the most famous example: A tablet with inscriptions of Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, Ancient Greek and another Egyptian script (Demotic) was used as a starting point to understand a long-dead language. No matter how elaborate, all decipherment techniques have the same core: pairing an unknown language with known bits of knowledge. This article will focus on the device’s decoding module for unknown languages, or decipherment. (Translation of known languages is, of course, also a part of the Star Trek universal translator, and on some occasions Star Trek linguists have to tweak the linguistic internals manually.) While not yet at the level of a human translation expert, machine translation is already usable in multiple scenarios. This technology is already a reality with a variety of approaches and new promising developments. No, this is not yet another post about machine translation. As a language geek and a sci-fi fan, I felt it only logical to look into the feasibility of the universal translator, the device used by the crew of the Starship Enterprise. ![]() Star Trek recently celebrated its 50th anniversary. Cinema critics keep raving about Arrival, a sci-fi drama by Denis Villeneuve focusing on one linguist’s attempts to decipher an alien language.
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