The Terminology of the Babylonian Talmud: Extraction, Representation and Use in the Context of Computational Linguistics

A formal digital structuring of the terminology of the Talmud is being carried out in the context of the Project for the Translation of the Babylonian Talmud in Italian. The terminological resource was encoded in the form of a multi-language Explanatory Combinatorial Dictionary (Hebrew-Aramaic-Italian) according to the principles of the Meaning-Text Theory. The construction of such a resource was supported by text processing and computational linguistics techniques aimed at automatically extracting terms from the Italian translation of the Talmud and aligning them with the corresponding Hebrew/Aramaic source terms. The paper describes the process that was set up for the construction of the terminological resource with the ultimate goal of illustrating the advantages of the adoption of a formal linguistic model. The terminological resource aims, indeed, to be a useful tool to deepen the characteristics of the languages of the Talmud, to help translators in their work and more generally scholars in their study of the Talmud itself.