The Massachusetts Institute of Technology reports that a new computer program can figure out how to translate ancient languages quicker and better than most linguistic experts. The program only needs to know a language in the same family as the unknown language, and then it will fill in the missing pieces itself. Apparently, the program translated a substantial portion of the ancient language Ugaritic in a matter of hours, based on its relation to ancient Hebrew.  Maybe a universal translator isn’t that far off from becoming a reality…  http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2010/ugaritic-barzilay-0630.html

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