Ars Astronomica – English translations of rare Hebrew and Latin astronomy texts

Posted by sweisman 6 hours ago

Comments

Comment by lordgrenville 32 minutes 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.

Comment by us-merul 21 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

Comment by lordgrenville 13 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?)

Comment by us-merul 6 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.

Comment by 1 hour ago

Comment by domschl 4 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.

Comment by kensai 3 hours ago

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

Amen!

Comment by sweisman 4 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?

Comment by NetOpWibby 4 hours ago

Yes, because if a human didn’t do it, how will we know of the translation is free of mistakes? /s

Comment by sweisman 4 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.

Comment by ButlerianJihad 7 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.

Comment by 1 hour ago

Comment by bflesch 4 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.

Comment by sweisman 4 hours ago

Thank you.

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

Maybe someday, although probably not CC licensed.

Comment by sweisman 6 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.

Comment by pmontra 20 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.

Comment by madhu_ghalame 5 hours ago

This is a valuable initiative. It would be great to include more historical context alongside each translated work.

Comment by 1 hour ago

Comment by devilfileprong 2 hours ago

[flagged]