78 pointsby sweisman7 hours ago7 comments
  • lordgrenvillean hour ago
    While it's really cool that this is possible now, this project seems to be a thin wrapper around running Claude. Presumably, someone who wanted to read one of these books could just run it through Claude themselves with comparable results.

    Sharing some artifact of your own added value, or things you learned in the process, would be more interesting to me than the output.

    • sweisman18 minutes ago
      I can assure you this is not a thin wrapper. Even the public repo of the first workable version of it is not a thin wrapper.

      You are welcome to try. It is not rocket science, but what I developed would take much effort to reproduce.

      I wrote an origin story about how I got started: https://aicentral.substack.com/p/pipeline-to-the-past

      It describes some of the added value and lessons learned.

      • ButlerianJihad2 minutes ago
        > I wrote an origin story

        No you didn't. It's under a pseudonym. Show us how you link your pseudonymous blogger self to your putative "real name".

        > not a thin wrapper

        It got 11 stars! WOW! Your publication repo has zero stars, zero watching, and zero forks!

        You have no profile photos; in one place you self-identify as "independent", i.e. no employer, no academic affiliations or credentials.

        Your translations are literally written by nobody, and your anonymous, out-of-context, one-line blurbs are not blurbs or reviews at all.

        I would say, with all due respect, that zero forks is the correct amount of forks to give about this project.

      • nullsanity12 minutes ago
        [dead]
    • us-merul40 minutes ago
      I think there's more to it than that. It's a combination of extracting the text from the PDFs, resolving persistently tricky issues (especially numbers), and flagging issues for human review at scale. You can view lessons from the author on the GitHub repo: https://github.com/sweisman/translation-pipeline
      • lordgrenville32 minutes ago
        Great, then rather post that! Although that repo looks like 100% AI artifact, not human intervention. (What does "flagging issues for human review at scale" mean in this context?)
        • sweisman13 minutes ago
          This is not what I use to translate. It was the first version to create usable output, and intentionally implemented in a code-free manner (today I have an extensive body of code in addition to the Claude Code harness instructions). Read my origin story, linked to in another comment, for more background.
          • lordgrenville2 minutes ago
            Reiterating what I wrote above, sharing these would have been more interesting imo than sharing the pipeline output.
        • us-merul25 minutes ago
          I was referring to this bullet under Lessons Learned: "Manuscript translation is feasible but rough. A 14th-century Sephardic manuscript hand is readable at ~70–80% accuracy. The output is a useful rough draft, not a polished translation. Plan for a longer discrepancy report and more editorial review." Some of the samples I looked at had question marks or original Hebrew text throughout, which I took to mean marked uncertainties.
          • sweisman11 minutes ago
            Manuscripts are doable but tougher than printed works. Hebrew likewise is tougher than Latin.
  • domschl5 hours ago
    Why was the comment of the author of the translation-site that explains the methodology flagged / dead?

    The mere fact that the translation was AI-assisted shouldn't be a reason to flag a comment. AI translations, especially supervised translations, can actually achieve a reasonable level of quality.

    Disagreement on AI philosophy shouldn't be a reason to flag a contribution.

    • kensai4 hours ago
      "Disagreement on AI philosophy shouldn't be a reason to flag a contribution."

      Amen!

    • sweisman5 hours ago
      A professional book editor and Hebrew translator said the translation of the one work he checked out was "impressive".

      Others have responded equally positively to the Latin translations.

      AI as a panacea is overwrought, but there are genuine positive uses of it. Would critics rather have NO translations of these pivotal works?

      • NetOpWibby5 hours ago
        Yes, because if a human didn’t do it, how will we know of the translation is free of mistakes? /s
        • sweisman5 hours ago
          Professional translators don't throw around the word "impressive" like that.

          You don't, yet I still stand by my work.

          I translated some books up to four times as I refined the process. The default behavior is repeatedly to not attempt to translate text it can't resolve for whatever reason. AIs do have a tendency to hallucinate, and I expended a lot of effort on minimizing this problem to the point it can be considered mitigated.

          • ButlerianJihad25 minutes ago
            Professional publishers collect blurbs which are attached to real names of real people, and bona fide reviewers write in full sentences with context, rather than anonymous nobodies writing about other anonymous nobodies "throwing around" singular adjectives.
            • sweisman16 minutes ago
              It's good enough for me. I'm not publicizing his name without permission. He is quite well-known and until I moved recently, was a neighbor of mine.
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  • bflesch5 hours ago
    Nice project, but I think the PDF format could be improved. I'd prefer having landscape layout and original text and translated text side-by-side or keep the portrait layout and do a line-by-line translation so that it is easier to review and spot translation errors.
    • sweisman5 hours ago
      Thank you.

      Your suggestion makes sense, and you are not the first to offer it.

      Maybe someday, although probably not CC licensed.

  • sweisman7 hours ago
    I built Ars Astronomica to make historically important works on astronomy, calendrics, and related sciences accessible in modern English. The project combines OCR, AI-assisted translation, editorial review, and publication into a workflow that can handle book-length works while preserving diagrams, mathematical notation, and references.

    The site currently includes English translations of rare Hebrew and Latin works, including texts that have never previously appeared in English and others that survive only in manuscript form. All editions are released under a Creative Commons license.

    I'm interested in feedback from historians of science, classicists, medievalists, digital-humanities researchers, and anyone interested in AI-assisted scholarly publishing.

    • pmontra39 minutes ago
      I don't belong to any of those categories of people but I'm glad that you took the effort to build this site. I didn't know about those texts and I will at least skim through a few of them now. Thanks.
  • madhu_ghalame5 hours ago
    This is a valuable initiative. It would be great to include more historical context alongside each translated work.
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  • devilfileprong3 hours ago
    [flagged]