Date: Mon, 05 Aug 2002 17:56:14 +0200
Subject: Re: TRANSLATION SOFTWARE


Cologne 05-Aug-2002

"Gary C. Moore" schrieb Mon, 5 Aug 2002 02:55:30 -0700 (PDT):

> Dear Dr. Eldred,
>
> Just a note. Many of my correspondents in relation to this issue have
> said that such software is impossible because of the great difference
> between ancient Greek and modern Western languages. This is nonsense.
> There are already available this moment NUMEROUS such programs
> covering much more distant languages as all the dialects of Chinese,
> Japanese, Korean, Thai, Turkish, Arabic, Hebrew, Swahili, etc. Greek
> should be a snap compared to those. But as one company put it to me,
> there are just not enough people out there wanting such a program to
> justify the expense of developing one. I did find one that said it had
> ancient Greek translating abilities but 1) it cost over $500 and 2) it
> was with eighty other languages, so I seriously doubt it could help me
> much with Psellus even if I could afford it.
>
> Gary C. Moore
>

Gary,

As a professional translator, I have some acquaintance with automatic
translation software, and the results are pretty funny on the whole. As
for philosophy, even a human translation is only as good as the thinking
of the translator him or herself, and is always a particular, more or
less enlightening interpretation. That's why, if you really want to get
to the heart of a thinker's thinking, such as Aristotle, there's no
alternative to learning the language for yourself.

At least in the US money has been put into setting up a web site like
Perseus which is a valuable resource. In German there is no equivalent.
The heyday of German scholarship was the nineteenth century where you
had enormous achievements in editing ancient texts, the Passow Greek
dictionary, the 80-volume Pauly encyclopaedia of the ancient world, the
33-volume Grimm Woerterbuch, etc. Since then it's been pretty much
downhill, in both scholarship and thinking. Today, there's not even any
digital versions of these great German reference works. The digital full
version of the critical Nietzsche edition is only available at a rip-off
price, despite there not being any copyright to pay. There is, however,
an excellent, cheap digital edition of Plato and of Hegel, and a good,
cheap, but incomplete digital version of Nietzsche.

As for German thinking, it's been a steady, unrelenting decline.

Heidegger's translations and interpretations of Greek passages and
individual Greek words are invaluable because he is always at pains to
point out simple phenomena behind philosophical words that the tradition
tends to employ as abstract terminology. Gadamer, by contrast, is
disappointing. His translation, say, of Aristotle Nic. Eth. Book VI is
lousy.

Michael
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