Dear Harry,

If your examples are from google translate, I can maybe say just a little bit more about how they work than I can with something like ChatGPT. There is a linguist by the name of Martin Benjamin who is doing testing of how (or how well) google translate works. Whenever a new language is added, he asks google to translate a number of phrases into that language and then asks natives of that language (or in the case of literary languages: scholars of that language) to comment on the quality of the translation. The Sanskrit I looked at was mostly gobbledygook because everything had been translated word by word, a method that could of course never render anything even vaguely idiomatic. The expression for 'having a fun time going shopping or to bars/restaurants' was thus rendered as  नगरस्य उपरि बहिः. (If you're interested, a rather discursive piece about his GT research involving 'out' phrases is here:  https://www.teachyoubackwards.com/conclusions/)

From my understanding of language as a linguist and a teacher of language and literature, I'd say that if AI is at some point able to generate human-quality texts, it will also be able to translate these into any language it has been trained on; but I don't think that it will ever be able to do decent work on human-created language that is even the tiniest bit literary in quality. There are just so many nuances and so much context (that is not recognisable as relevant context for most people, and thus would most likely not be involved in how the software is trained) that needs to be considered to understand (and thus translate) a text; I'm happy to give examples of this.

Ananya, I think we'll be fine:-). But as McComas rightly points out, the faultiness of these results makes them excellent teaching tools. (At the very least because you can dissect those mistakes as much as you want, while humane teachers would be kinder than that when correcting student mistakes.) Oliver, I very much agree that it would be interesting to see where the simple grammatical errors come from; but I suspect that this has to do with who google has working for them, and how, and that is something they will probably (?) not divulge.

--Antonia



On Tue, 28 Nov 2023 at 03:42, Harry Spier via INDOLOGY <indology@list.indology.info> wrote:
Minor clarification.  The examples I gave are from Google Translate not ChaptGPT but clearly what you say makes sense to that also. 
 I'm wondering how does an AI application learn how to translate a language.  Do human beings program in a bunch of translation rules of how to translate language x to language y  and then these human beings refine the rules over time.  Or is there a kind of general artificial intelligence programmed into a computer that is just fed thousands of sentences and their translations and from that it learns how to translate language x to language y and with more sentences fed in, it itself refines its translation ability.? In other words learning language translation almost like a human being, by practice.

Harry Spier


On Mon, Nov 27, 2023 at 5:39 PM Antonia Ruppel <antonia.ruppel@gmail.com> wrote:
The use of the past active participle to render the English past active is to be expected: it’s the standard/most common way to render the past tense in modern/spoken Sanskrit as taught eg by Samskrta Bharati, and I assume that that’s the sort of Sanskrit that ChatGPT is trained on. Not applying external sandhi also is not uncommon in modern Sanskrit, at least as used by those who aren’t complete masters of the language the way eg Madhav is. 

Antonia 

On Mon 27 Nov 2023 at 23:29, Harry Spier via INDOLOGY <indology@list.indology.info> wrote:
Madhav wrote:
I hear that students are already beginning to use Google-Translator to do their Sanskrit homework.

I just did a little experiment.  Taking a few of the english translations in Apte's  "The Student's Guide to Sanskrit Composition" and comparing what Google Translator gave as a sanskrit translation of these, and comparing to the original sanskrit quotes .  A couple of surprising things stood out.  Surprising because these are fundamental things nothing subtle.  Google translator seems to use sanskrit past active participle to translate english simple past.  It doesn't seem to apply visarga sandhi, a completely mechanical process.

In these examples, the yellow highlighted sanskrit is the citation from Apte, the blue highlighted sanskrit is the google sanskrit translation of Apte's english translation given below.

 Rama saw govinda

rāmo govindamapaśyat

rāmaḥ govindaṁ dṛṣṭavān


I Salute the parents of the universe, Parvati and Paramesvara.

jagataḥ pitarau vande pārvatīparameśvarau

viśvasya mātāpitarau pārvatīṁ parameśvaraṁ ca namāmi


He washed his hands and feet.

hastau pādau cākṣālayat

saḥ hastapādau prakṣālitavān।


She shut her eyes

sā locane nyamīlayat |

sā netrāṇi nimīlitavatī


So says the revered Shankara

iti śrīśaṁkārācāryāḥ |

tathā vadati pūjyaḥ śaṅkaraḥ।


Thou art, therefore, a friend.

tasmāt sakhā tvam asi

tena tvaṁ mitram asi


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