I’ve had an email from Evangelos Varthis, telling me about his project at Ionian University. It’s still very experimental, but there is some very interesting thinking going on here. Basically he’s making the Greek text of the PG available, in image, and in electronic text, plus a simple way to get an AI translation of it alongside.
Here’s what he says:
I am mainly involved in presenting information about PG Migne and I personally appreciate and understand the value of these texts….
Experimentally, I and others have uploaded a list of patristic texts from various sources, mainly to see how Artificial Intelligence translation can help.
The Greek texts have a decent translation into Greek (I understand Greek and English), although manual editing is required in various places for greater clarity. Here I would say that even human translated material has a degree of ambiguity.
If you have time, visit the following website, i would appreciate any feedback.
https://scholarios.graeca.org/pgworks/ also (select greek text and right click to translate)
https://scholarios.graeca.org/public/pgfront/index.html?vol= 1&page=0001
The first link takes you to a list of authors and works.
Clicking on the first of these gives a list of languages, and clicking English gives you this:
However I notice that the AI translation has omitted the title and first sentence, so perhaps a bug there. All the same, this works fine.
The second link takes you to a presentation of the volumes with parallel transcription, and again an AI translation option. This is potentially really useful. Unfortunately there is some work to do here: the only way to change page is to change the URL manually – not a problem – and right-clicking on the text brings up a menu, which, instead of calling the AI translation, prompts for the text to translate! I’m sure that this did work, but AI can be tricky like that, and changes what response it gives without warning.
All the same, this will be a very useful thing to have when they’ve got a bit further down the line with it. Well done guys!