Starting a translation project
I'm starting the project of translating my grandfather Morris Goldowsky's book from Yiddish into English. It's an autobiography that I've never been able to read.
פון ווייטן אמאל און היינט : מיינע 60 יאר לעבן און קאמף אין דער ארבעטער-באוועגונג
("From Long Ago to Today: My 60 Years of Life and Struggle in the Workers’ Movement")
I'm planning to document my process and progress here.
For a long time I have wanted to get this book translated, but hiring a professional felt expensive and daunting. Finally, though, software (namely, large language models) has caught up and now seems able to do a decent job — not literary quality, probably, but at least enough to get the plot accurately. I have been very encouraged by my first experiments, but we will see how it works as I try to make my way through the book.
I've talked with some publishing friends, joined Facebook groups, begged favors from people I know who speak Yiddish, and corresponded with the Yiddish Book Center—which saved me a lot of time by having a high-quality scan of the book and a version converted to text with their Yiddish-specific OCR tool.
Now I start trying different AI tools to translate sections and do what I can to check the accuracy and naturalness of the output, so that I can decide on the best model to use.