For many PaleoJudaica posts on (Old) Church Slavonic, start here and follow the links. Church Slavonic preserves some ancient literature that otherwise would have been lost, including some intriguing Old Testament pseudepigrapha.
As noted in the Three Pillars post, the "other" AI translation experiment involved medieval Latin. That first post above also links to other blog posts about Google Translate and Latin.
I have a story about Google Translate. Some years ago when I was plowing through the important Judeo-Arabic manuscripts of Sefer ha-Razim, I used Google Translate to help me with some of the more difficult words.
Judeo-Arabic is medieval Arabic written in the Hebrew alphabet. Since the sound repretoire of the two languages does not overlap completely, Judeo-Arabic can be challenging to decipher.
I would take an uncertain word, do a provisional retroversion of the Hebrew script into Arabic, then run the word through Google Translate Arabic. If a first try didn't produce anything that made sense, I would try a slightly different retroversion. Frequently this process would turn up the correct Arabic word within a few iterations.
I could have done the same thing with an Arabic lexicon, but Google Translate saved me a good deal of time and effort.
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