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I’m working on translating the Renaissance — it was mostly written in Latin and 90% of it has never been translated to English. Even big names, like Ficino, Dur
by dr_dshiv 21d ago
I’m working on translating the Renaissance — it was mostly written in Latin and 90% of it has never been translated to English. Even big names, like Ficino, Durer, Kircher, Fludd and Drebbel. And that’s Latin— things much more sparse in other classical languages.
https://SourceLibrary.org https://SourceLibrary.org is a hub that now provides over 20,000 translations of classical texts in dozens of languages (Latin and Greek but also Chinese, Sanskrit, etc). We always provide the original image of the text next to the AI translation (so if you don’t trust it, you can do it again). For a sense of scale, SourceLibrary now hosts more words than English Wikipedia!
You can freely connect to the public MCP for research; that way AI can read books and not hallucinate quotes. In Claude, it also retrieves images directly into the chat.
This is a philanthropic project based at the non-profit “The Embassy of the Free Mind” in Amsterdam, a rare book library devoted to free thought and mysticism. https://embassyofthefreemind.com https://embassyofthefreemind.com
SourceLibrary is totally free and open source. If we can raise the money, we hope to translate 100k books before the end of the year.
If you want to dive in, I’d suggest trying our research agent with a rabbithole topic of your choice: https://sourcelibrary.org/librarian/ https://sourcelibrary.org/librarian/
- NishanStepak 21d agoI am curious about this. I have found that there are number of primary works that have not been translated into english and are in the public domain in their native language. Translations are copyrighted if they are recent. I have a very short list of items which are of interest to me. They are things like Sundiata Lion King of Mali not having a public domain translation in English that I can find easily or there not being a public domain translation of Dede Korkut in English. Many of the better translations are copyrighted and not free.
- dr_dshiv 21d agoThanks. It looks like we have some but not all of the original works you are looking for: https://sourcelibrary.org/librarian/thread/6aa7656bfa07a553c86f7627 https://sourcelibrary.org/librarian/thread/6aa7656bfa07a553c... I’ll try to track down the ones you are looking for tomorrow. Yes, we avoid copyrighted modern translations.
- adrianwaj 20d agoIt's a great endeavor. I put it at the bottom of my new search hub https://search.future-secured.com https://search.future-secured.com I would just make sure all the titles can be clearly seen when superimposed over the pictures. Looks like a pressing matter to fix. I actually liked the original https://archive.sacred-texts.com/ https://archive.sacred-texts.com/ site because it's so fast and lightweight and classified by religions. I would also look at classification by languages. Is that being done at present? I started a conversation about interfaces here if interested. https://share.gemini.google/ciOqbMFyCpBv https://share.gemini.google/ciOqbMFyCpBv