[INDOLOGY] Google Translate for Sanskrit

Fri May 13 09:51:42 UTC 2022

I think it's also worth asking what the programmers who made this meant
when they said 'Sanskrit'. The classical language, or the modern spoken
version taught and stratified by organisations like e.g. Samskrita Bharati?
I tried a few simple sentences (I went into town, I saw the man, Where is
the cat? etc) and found that
-- the past tense is expressed by means of the ta- and tavant- participles
(the default is the masculine participle, by the way, even when you try
things like 'I, Sītā, went into town'), as favoured e.g. by modern spoken
Sanskrit (not only by it, of course)
--  'Where is the cat?' resulted in the word order बिडालः कुत्र अस्ति
favoured by modern Sanskrit (and mirrored by e.g. Hindi).
- my, her etc in sentences like 'she sees her sisters' are usually
expressed, e.g. by means of sva- or through the actual genitive pronoun,
unlike the Classical Sanskrit tendency of only expressing this when
omission causes confusion
- with at least some expressions we get the noun in accusative + karoti
expression (e.g. smitam karoti rather than smayati), that, I think, also
becomes more prevalent as time passes
- external sandhi is not applied, again following the prevalent modern
spoken convention

Entering 'I have seen him' (rather than 'I saw him') gives me मया तं
दृष्टम्, which I don't quite understand because I'd have expected 'him' to
be the subject and thus nominative. (The same results with other transitive
verbs.)

When you create a translation program, you need to decide what the 'right'
translation of something is. With literary languages, like Sanskrit, whose
features usually include variety of expression, that is difficult. So it
seems natural that the programmers would use the standards of the modern
spoken language, for whose creation those decisions were at some point made.

That google translate now includes Sanskrit is a fascinating social
phenomenon. I'm looking forward to seeing how they are going to develop it,
and hope someone might at some point talk about their methodology in
creating this function. (Let's find out and invite them to a conference? It
would surely make for a fascinating talk!)

All best,
     Antonia

On Fri, 13 May 2022 at 10:01, Satyanad Kichenassamy <
satyanad.kichenassamy at univ-reims.fr> wrote:

>
> Dear All,
>
> Here are a few further experiments that illustrate other issues :
>
> Input: सत्यमेव जयते
> Output: Truth always triumphs
>
> Input: Truth always triumphs
> Output: सत्यं सदा विजयते
>
> Input: सत्यं सदा विजयते
> Output: Truth always triumphs
>
> Input: C'est la réalité qui triomphe
> Output: Reality wins
>
> Input: C'est la réalité qui triomphe.
> Output: It is reality that triumphs.
>
> (The only difference between the last two inputs is the final period.)
>
> Input: Reality prevails.
> Input: La réalité l'emporte.
>
> Input: Reality alone prevails.
> Output: Seule la réalité prévaut.
>
> Input: Seule la réalité prévaut.
> Output: Only reality prevails.
>
> And, for fun, Prop. 12.21 from Brahmagupta's Braahmasphu.tasiddhaanta.
>
> Input: स्थूलफलं त्रिचतुर्भुजबाहुप्रतिबाहुयोगदलघातः।
> भुजयोगार्धचतुष्टयभुजोनघातात्पदं सूक्ष्मम् ॥
>
> Output: The gross fruit is the three-four-arm arm-counter-arm combination
> team attack.
> The subtle step is from the impact of the four and a half arms of the Yoga
> of the arms.
>
> A correct translation is as follows (the four lines correspond to the four
> parts of this Arya verse):
> A crude value [indeed] of the area of a triquadrilateral
>    Is the product of the half-sums of opposite sides ;
> Of a group consisting of four half-sums of the sides, from which
>    The sides have been subtracted [in turn], the root of the product is
> the refined [value].
>
> NB: There are quite a few technical terms here; taking some of them in
> their ordinary meaning leads to gibberish. "Pada" here is the square root
> (because the foot of a tree is its root). Yoga is here the sum. "Dala" is
> the half (literally, "broken (in half)"). A triquadrilateral is the figure
> obtained from a trilateral by adding a fourth vertex on its circumcircle.
> Tricaturbhuja is a neologism introduced by Brahmagupta that we translated
> by a neologism because there is no corresponding notion in English.
>
> Thus, Google Translate seems adequate at the स्थूल level, but may miss the
> सूक्ष्म.
>
> Reverting to general issues from an Indological or mathematical (or
> computer science) viewpoint, I would suggest offhand the following for
> discussion:
>
> (i) is the algorithm public or not? (Probably not, but who knows?)
>
> (ii) is there a public algorithm with comparable performance?
>
> (iii) what is the knowledge base (or training set in the sense of neural
> networks) of known algorithms?
>
> (iv) a possibly related issue is that there does not seem to be any
> equivalent for Indian languages of Chinese databases such as ctext.org
> for instance, that include many tools in addition to searching. For
> Sanskrit and Tamil, we are grateful to have what you can find on
> https://indology.info/external-resources/
> including
> https://www.projectmadurai.org/
> http://gretil.sub.uni-goettingen.de/gretil.html
> https://titus.uni-frankfurt.de/indexf.htm
>
> etc.
>
> For Sanskrit morphology and, to some extent, parsing, the situation is
> much better : https://sanskrit.inria.fr/DICO/
> But such tools do not seem to have been integrated into other databases
> (so that, for instance,  hovering the mouse over a word would suggest its
> grammatical nature, or suggest meanings -- such things exist in Chinese).
> This may require the text input into the database to integrate a modicum of
> grammatical analysis and therefore, what amounts to an implicit commentary.
> This may nonetheless be appropriate for research journals that could
> provide enriched versions of papers. Automated translation always requires
> some form of semantic input anyway, except for the crudest examples.
>
> Best regards,
>
>      Satyanad Kichenassamy
>
> On Thu, 12 May 2022 16:48:48 -0400
> Elliot Stern via INDOLOGY <indology at list.indology.info> wrote:
>
> > Aleksandar’s comment is spot on:
> >
> >
> >
> > Elliot M. Stern
> > 552 South 48th Street
> > Philadelphia, PA 19143-2029
> > emstern1948 at gmail.com
> > 267-240-8418
> >
> > > On May 12, 2022, at 1:45 PM, Uskokov, Aleksandar via INDOLOGY <
> indology at list.indology.info> wrote:
> > >
> > > It will be a while before it becomes a philosopher --
> > >
> > > Aleksandar Uskokov
> > > Lector in Sanskrit
> > > South Asian Studies Council, Yale University
> > > 203-432-1972 | aleksandar.uskokov at yale.edu <mailto:
> aleksandar.uskokov at yale.edu>
> > >
> > > Office Hours Sign-up: https://calendly.com/aleksandar-uskokov <
> https://calendly.com/aleksandar-uskokov>
> > > From: INDOLOGY <indology-bounces at list.indology.info <mailto:
> indology-bounces at list.indology.info>> on behalf of Madhav Deshpande via
> INDOLOGY <indology at list.indology.info <mailto:indology at list.indology.info
> >>
> > > Sent: Thursday, May 12, 2022 1:31 PM
> > > To: Dominik Wujastyk <wujastyk at gmail.com <mailto:wujastyk at gmail.com>>
> > > Cc: Indology <indology at list.indology.info <mailto:
> indology at list.indology.info>>
> > > Subject: Re: [INDOLOGY] Google Translate for Sanskrit
> > >
> > > This is Google Translator for the first verse of Meghadūta:
> > >
> > > "Someone is neglected by the teacher of separation from his lover:
> > > Shapenastangmitamahima varshabhogyaena bhartu:
> > > The yaksha bathed Janaka's daughter in the holy waters
> > > I lived in the hermitages of Ramagiri among the lush shady trees."
> > >
> > > GT could not figure out the long compounds, and "guru" got translated
> as "teacher." The syntax of the verse is also missed.
> > >
> > > Madhav M. Deshpande
> > > Professor Emeritus, Sanskrit and Linguistics
> > > University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA
> > > Senior Fellow, Oxford Center for Hindu Studies
> > > Adjunct Professor, National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore,
> India
> > >
> > > [Residence: Campbell, California, USA]
> > >
> > >
> > > On Thu, May 12, 2022 at 10:17 AM Madhav Deshpande <mmdesh at umich.edu
> <mailto:mmdesh at umich.edu>> wrote:
> > > <image.png>
> > > Madhav M. Deshpande
> > > Professor Emeritus, Sanskrit and Linguistics
> > > University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA
> > > Senior Fellow, Oxford Center for Hindu Studies
> > > Adjunct Professor, National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore,
> India
> > >
> > > [Residence: Campbell, California, USA]
> > >
> > >
> > > On Thu, May 12, 2022 at 10:16 AM Dominik Wujastyk via INDOLOGY <
> indology at list.indology.info <mailto:indology at list.indology.info>> wrote:
> > > It's quite remarkable:
> > > <image.png>
> > >
> > >
> > > _______________________________________________
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> >
> > > <Screenshot 2022-05-12 134349.png>
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>
> --
> **********************************************
> Satyanad KICHENASSAMY
> Professor of Mathematics
> Laboratoire de Mathématiques de Reims  (CNRS, UMR9008)
> Université de Reims Champagne-Ardenne
> F-51687 Reims Cedex 2
> France
> Web: https://www.normalesup.org/~kichenassamy
> **********************************************
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