Would the newest Google translator give a good English version of Plato's work?

Thunderballs September 18, 2021 at 15:35 1325 views 3 comments

If the the original versions of Plato's work were translated into English by the newest computer translator of Google, would we get a faihful, true, verisimilar, body of English Plato? Will we be able to notice the fact that a computer translated? I've heard that the newest programs perform very well. I haven't used it yet but I remember that translations made me laugh quite often. Will fleshy translators always be needed? Maybe I should let Google translate this text to Greek, so I could see what comes out...

Comments (3)

Deleted user August 16, 2024 at 11:51 #925926 0 likes

Three years later, Google Translate doesn't have the ability to translate from Attic Greek. To this day, even translations from Modern Greek are far from perfect. So no.

Translators in general, except perhaps those powered by AI, which are exactly trained on translations of different works in multiple languages, won't give a good translation of any philosophy work. Think Chinese room.

Deleted User August 16, 2024 at 15:16 #925977 0 likes

This user has been deleted and all their posts removed.

Deleted user August 19, 2024 at 16:14 #926633 0 likes

As far as I know, books as we know them, piles of sheets laced together from the back, were created around Late Antiquity. The ancient words for book were used to refer to scrolls before books proper were created¹. Later, the word came to mean only one thing, and another word was picked up for the other thing — that happened in Late Latin at least (confront French parchemin to livre). The Tibetan word ????? (pecha) supposedly is the same for both book and scroll, but I can't confirm.

[sup]1 – This information is from the introduction to the edition of The Odyssey I own.[/sup]