Sometimes the only way forward is to plunge in, and see what happens.\u00a0 So I have taken the modern Greek translation of Methodius ad Theodorum by Ch. Stergioulis, and machine-translated it into English.\u00a0 The results are attached, together with Stergioulis original, which has the ancient Greek facing the modern Greek, and footnotes at the end.<\/p>\n
The ancient Greek original is preserved in a single Vatican manuscript, which gave the editor, G. Anrich, a lot of problems – so much so that he printed it in volume 1 of his\u00a0Agios Nikolaos<\/em>, and then printed a transcription of the manuscript in vol. 2, with corrections.\u00a0 Some of his footnotes in vol. 1 betray bafflement; and so do some of Stergioulis’ footnotes!\u00a0 Words otherwise unknown, I gather.\u00a0 It’s clear that the text is corrupt.<\/p>\n I scanned Stergioulis’ translation into a Word document (attached).\u00a0 Then for each chapter I did the following:<\/p>\n This was usually straightforward, not least because the chapters were small.<\/p>\n For a couple of chapters Bard AI threw a wobbly.\u00a0 Instead of outputting a translation, it started to spew a message in Greek, basically saying “I am an AI model, I don’t know how to do that.”\u00a0 It seems that it was ignoring the English part of my request string, thought that I was writing in Greek, and so it treated the Greek passage as itself a request to do something, not as something to translate.\u00a0 I found that replying with \u201cCould you translate that request from modern Greek into English?\u201d did the trick, and caused it to translate instead.<\/p>\n Anyway, here is the output from this process.<\/p>\n The translation is readable enough.\u00a0 I’m not sure how accurate it is – any comments, anyone?<\/p>\n\n
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