  The Book of the Dean of Lismore (BDL) is a 16th-century Scottish Gaelic
manuscript written in a non-standard orthography. In this work, we outline the
problem of transliterating the text of the BDL into a standardised orthography,
and perform exploratory experiments using Transformer-based models for this
task. In particular, we focus on the task of word-level transliteration, and
achieve a character-level BLEU score of 54.15 with our best model, a BART
architecture pre-trained on the text of Scottish Gaelic Wikipedia and then
fine-tuned on around 2,000 word-level parallel examples. Our initial
experiments give promising results, but we highlight the shortcomings of our
model, and discuss directions for future work.
