The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

Literary Chinese is not the same language as Mandarin or Cantonese. Google Translate copes better with Literary texts than if you were trying to put Latin into the Portuguese translator because of the logographic nature of the text and the fact that Literary turns of phrase are much more current in China than Latin ones are in countries that speak Romance languages, but the language of the SBJ is emphatically not the language that Google Translate is trained to work with. You cannot rely on it for work with text in Literary Chinese.

I know that Google Translate is useless for translating the SBJ. (It translated "Minerals, Low grade" to "inferior department of Jade", and worse things).

I am using Google AI, and now also ChatGPT, to translate the SBJ to English and other languages. Those lalamos claim to base their translations on extensive scholarly literature about old Chinese medical texts, in particular the SBJ and its translations in other languages.  Thus they offer detailed explanations for their translations, including references.  But I have not checked the references myself, and they may well be hallucinating.

JoJo's suggestion of using each system to check the proposals of the other has been quite useful. It corrected several mistakes and bad choices that they had made.  In the end I got a text that was approved by both systems.  Of course that still may be very wrong (like the "consensus" of human experts) but it is the best I can do at the moment.

(The other day someone posted a clip of a VMS drawing where one nymph is pulling the towel or hair of another.  It made me recall a famous Japanese block print (ukyo-e) depicting a brawl in a women's public bath. But I didn't remember the name of the artist, so I asked Google AI.  It promptly gave me two answers, with name, date, everything.  But one of them was a peaceful interior scene from a women's bath house without any brawl.  I struggled to find the other one.  In the end I found that there were three famous paintings of brawls in bath houses, both men's and women's.  Goggle AI had mashed together the names f the three artists into a single non-existent new name.  

Anyway, one of the three was the one I remembered.  Of course it is not relevant to the VMS since it is fairly modern, but You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. for curiosity.)

All the best, while it is still possible, --stolfi