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| Translations of this website |
Comment January 2025
For many years I have left the original Chinese text in places where the content was important but I didn't have the time or skill to do a reliable translation. It was still - and remains still - useful to have it here to give a general idea of what had been written. As examples of this, see the pages such as
Having such texts there also made it easier to ask help with translation from friends with better translation skills than mine. I could also use Google translate in places, though for classical Chinese it was pretty useless.
Then in January 2025 I tried some AI translation and discovered that ChatGPT-4o (released May 2024) does an amazing job with classical Chinese, so now I am using a subscriber version of that. Although it can make very bad mistakes on its own and even invent content based on its "intuition", with proper guidance it is an invaluable tool. With poems, for example, you can ask it to do both literal and poetic translations as well as word for word analysis.
Here is a review of ChatGPT in Nature (26 June 2024, so prior to ChatGPT-4o) by four scholars at the Chinese University of Hong Kong:
The article praises ChatGPT's performance while at the same time warning against its potential for errors, particularly in terms of cultural appropriation.
Since reading that I have tried the latest version of another AI program, DeepSeek-V3, apparently released December 2024. From my preliminary experience it seems quite similar to ChapGPT.
Nevertheless, on this site I plan not to publish AI translations as is, though I may well use them, or even rely on them heavily, to help my own. Similarly I encourage readers to use AI to translate the Chinese text on this site, but to retain skepticism about the accuracy of the translations. At a minimum ask for literal, phrase by phrase, or even word by word translations.
A major limitation remains, however, in that that many of the valuable Chinese resources remain available only in traditional printing, perhaps not even digitally copied online. Other times they have been copied into text versions with OCR but with many mistakes. To do a proper AI translation of course it is important to have an accurate source - AI is more likely to use its "imagination" to make sense of mistakes rather than to suggest that the original was mistaken.
As for translations already on this site I should give especial thanks to 金秋雨 Jin Qiuyu, who did quite a few when she was still a high school student.
As for translations from this site into other languages, some years ago I found that the front page had been translated into several languages:
However, these seem to have been temporary and/or changing address at times.
I would be interested to hear from anyone who has seen translations into other languages, or would be interested in doing so.
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