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Ars Astronomica – English translations of rare Hebrew and Latin astronomy texts
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Re: Ars Astronomica – English translations of rare Hebrew and Latin astronomy texts
#12[deleted]
Re: Ars Astronomica – English translations of rare Hebrew and Latin astronomy texts
#13Why 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.
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Re: Ars Astronomica – English translations of rare Hebrew and Latin astronomy texts
#14[dead]
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Re: Ars Astronomica – English translations of rare Hebrew and Latin astronomy texts
#15While 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.
Re: Ars Astronomica – English translations of rare Hebrew and Latin astronomy texts
#16While 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.
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
Re: Ars Astronomica – English translations of rare Hebrew and Latin astronomy texts
#17I 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,…
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.
Re: Ars Astronomica – English translations of rare Hebrew and Latin astronomy texts
#18While 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.
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
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?)
Re: Ars Astronomica – English translations of rare Hebrew and Latin astronomy texts
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, because if a human didn’t do it, how will we know of the translation is free of mistakes? /s
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 considere…
Professional publishers collect blurbs which are attached to real names of real people, and bona fide reviewers write in full sentences with context, without
Re: Ars Astronomica – English translations of rare Hebrew and Latin astronomy texts
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
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?)
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.