“It’s not hard to imagine that recent advances in machine translation might help. In just a few years, the study of linguistics has been revolutionized by the availability of huge annotated databases, and techniques for getting machines to learn from them. Consequently, machine translation from one language to another has become routine. And although it isn’t perfect, these methods have provided an entirely new way to think about language.”

An interesting article about an IT scientific team who has developed a machine-learning system capable of translating lost languages. The approach they used was very different from the standard machine translation techniques.

The article: Machine learning has been used to automatically translate long-lost languages