This paper illustrates a workflow for developing and evaluating automatic translation alignment models for Ancient Greek. We designed an annotation Style Guide and a gold standard for the alignment of Ancient Greek-English and Ancient Greek-Portuguese, measured inter-annotator agreement and used the resulting dataset to evaluate the performance of various translation alignment models. We proposed a fine-tuning strategy that employs unsupervised training with mono- and bilingual texts and supervised training using manually aligned sentences. The results indicate that the fine-tuned model based on XLM-Roberta is superior in performance, and it achieved good results on language pairs that were not part of the training data.

This paper presents the results of automatic translation alignment experiments on a corpus of texts in Ancient Greek translated into Latin. We used a state-of-the-art alignment workflow based on a contextualized multilingual language model that is fine-tuned on the alignment task for Ancient Greek and Latin. The performance of the alignment model is evaluated on an alignment gold standard consisting of 100 parallel fragments aligned manually by two domain experts, with a 90.5% Inter-Annotator-Agreement (IAA). An interactive online interface is provided to enable users to explore the aligned fragments collection and examine the alignment model’s output.