Activity
interdisciplinary talkDescription
More than a thousand years ago in Palestine of the Islamic Golden Age, some Steven, a Christian Arab monk from Ramle, a mixed Jewish-Arab city in the central Israel today, settled in a monastery near Bethlehem, where he copied an Arabic translation of the Gospels. Perhaps without realising the significance of what he was doing, he wrote the date of his work – 897 CE. This remains the oldest specifically dated manuscript of the Christian Arabic Bible. It is this manuscript that a millennium later five young Muslim siblings – four sisters and their brother – from one of the leading Arab clans of al-Khalil, the southern West Bank of the Occupied Palestinian Territories, are transcribing right now and rendering its text into their own Colloquial Arabic dialect, creating the very first rendition of the Gospels of this kind. This they do as Dr Jakub Zbrzeżny’s collaborators contracted by the University of Aberdeen, thanks to the Pump Prime Research Funding. Their collaborative work has led to a British Academy Talent Development Award, enabling a more advanced project on the Book of Genesis, as well as to a Royal Society of Edinburgh Collaboration Grant, in which the modern dialect rendition of these ancient biblical texts becomes a hitherto ‘unseen’ benchmark for measuring the (in)efficiency of Large Language Models such as ChatGPT for handling Colloquial Arabic today. This will lead to creating a guidance on non-specialist prompt engineering for those English native-speakers who need to facilitate their communication with Arabic-speaking refugees. Monk Steven would smile.| Period | 4 Sept 2024 |
|---|---|
| Event title | Interdisciplinary Research and Innovation Symposium |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Aberdeen, United KingdomShow on map |