The Talmud System: a Collaborative Web Application for the Translation of the Babylonian Talmud Into Italian
Authors: Andrea Bellandi, Davide Albanesi, Alessia Bellusci, Andrea Bozzi, Emiliano Giovannetti (CNR-ILC, 2014)
Topic: Lexical and Semantic Resources and Analysis

Abstract
In this paper we introduce the Talmud System, a collaborative web ap-plication for the translation of the Baby-lonian Talmud into Italian. The system we are developing in the context of the “Pro-getto Traduzione del Talmud Babilonese” has been designed to improve the expe-rience of collaborative translation using Computer-Assisted Translation technolo-gies and providing a rich environment for the creation of comments and the annota-tion of text on a linguistic and semantic ba-sis.

Introduction
Alongside the Bible, the Babylonian Talmud (BT) is the Jewish text that has mostly influenced Jew-ish life and thought over the last two millennia. The BT corresponds to the effort of late antique scholars (Amoraim) to provide an exegesis of the Mishnah, an earlier rabbinic legal compilation, di-vided in six “orders” (sedarim) corresponding to different categories of Jewish law, with a total of 63 tractates (massekhtaot). Although following the inner structure of the Mishnah, the BT dis-cusses only 37 tractates, with a total of 2711 dou-ble sided folia in the printed edition (Vilna, XIX century). The BT is a comprehensive literary cre-ation, which went through an intricate process of oral and written transmission, was expanded in every generations before its final redaction, and has been the object of explanatory commentaries and reflexions from the Medieval Era onwards. In its long history of formulation, interpretation, transmission and study, the BT reflects inner de-velopments within the Jewish tradition as well as the interactions between Judaism and the cultures with which the Jews came into contact (Strack and Stemberger, 1996). In the past decades, online resources for studying Rabbinic literature have considerably increased and several digital collec-tions of Talmudic texts and manuscripts are nowa-days available (Lerner, 2010). Particularly, schol-ars as well as a larger public of users can bene-fit from several new computing technologies ap-plied to the research and the study of the BT, such as (i.) HTML (Segal, 2006), (ii.) optical char-acter recognition, (iii.) three-dimensional com-puter graphics (Small, 1999), (iv.) text encod-ing, text and data mining (v.) image recognition (Wolf et al., 2011(a); Wolf et al., 2011(b); Shweka et al., 2013), and (vi.) computer-supported learning environments (Klamma et al., 2005; Klamma et al., 2002). In the context of the “Progetto Traduzione del Talmud Babilonese”, the Institute for Computational Linguistics of the Italian National Research Council (ILC-CNR) is in charge of developing a collaborative Java-EE web application for the translation of the BT into Italian by a team of translators. The Talmud System (TS) already includes Computer-Assisted Translation (CAT), Knowledge Engineering and Digital Philology tools, and, in future versions, will include Natural Language Processing tools for Hebrew/Aramaic, each of which will be outlined in detail in the next Sections.

Conclusion
We here introduced the Talmud System, a collaborative web application for the translation of the Babylonian Talmud into Italian integrating technologies belonging to the areas of (i.) ComputerAssisted Translation, (ii.) Digital Philology, (iii.) Knowledge Engineering and (iv.) Natural Language Processing. Through the enhancement of the already integrated components (i., ii., iii.) and the inclusion of new ones (iv.) the TS will allow, in addition to the improvement of the quality and pace of the translation, to provide a multi-layered navigation (linguistic, philological and semantic) of the translated text (Bellandi et al., 2014(c)).