Digitization and Preservation of Cultural Heritage: Translating the Coptic Scripts on Artifacts

Coptic represents the final stage of the Ancient Egyptian language and remains an important component of Christian and Mediterranean cultural heritage. Although several digital resources exist for Coptic textual corpora, Greek-oriented computational tools for the interpretation of Coptic inscriptions on artifacts remain limited. This study presents the design and early implementation of a semi-automated software tool for the computer-assisted translation of Coptic inscriptions into Greek, with optional English support. The tool combines a Coptic–Greek digital dictionary, an interactive character-selection interface, and two dictionary-search strategies: a length/alphabetically structured linear search and a weighted linear search based on expected word frequency. The application is intended to support scholars working with inscriptions on fragile or fragmented cultural heritage objects, where full automation is not realistic and human supervision remains essential. The paper describes the linguistic and material challenges of Coptic inscriptions, the structure of the lexical database, the interface design, and the planned use of Coptic corpora for improving retrieval efficiency. The proposed approach contributes to cultural heritage digitization by offering a practical, expandable, and user-oriented framework for supporting the study, interpretation, and preservation of Coptic inscriptions.