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Galen First Drafts: Machine First-Draft English Translations of Thirteen Works of the Galenic Corpus, with Their Checks

Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Much of Galen's surviving writing has never been translated into English in full. Galen First Drafts publishes machine first-draft English translations of thirteen works of the Galenic corpus (one of them, On Leeches, probably pseudo-Galenic) that have no complete English translation that we know of, from Kühn's Greek as digitized by First1KGreek (244,007 words of Greek). Every passage is shown beside its Greek, with two independent renderings by two language models of the same developer (Anthropic) and the outcome of three machine checks: back-translation into Greek, agreement between the two renderings on technical terms, and a dictionary-anchored model judge salted with planted errors and controls. The thresholds were fixed before each run; the judge's controls were rebuilt twice after its gate failed, and every verdict reported uses the last version. Passages that fail are marked and kept. In a reading of 39 random passages against the Greek by model readers, 4 had minor slips, all in passages the checks had passed. For two works the drafts were compared, term by term, with a scholar's English under a lenient rule (a target agrees if any content word of the rendering occurs anywhere in the scholar's passage): agreement with Manuela Marai's English of On the Composition of Drugs by Kind was 63.5% and 66.4% on ten calibration passages and 60.9% and 62.3% on 40 further passages from her thesis; with A. A. Long's English of one paragraph of On Difficulty of Breathing it was 2 and 3 of 14 terms. We also describe a catalogue of 678 items noted in the drafts by model readers. Two model research agents checked its items on lost authors and works and on Galen's own works against Fichtner's Corpus Galenicum (2023) and the fragment collections; none was shown to be unknown to scholarship. No scholar has read the drafts. They are for reading and for correction, not for quotation. Site: montblanctech.github.io/Galen/first-drafts/. Data and code: github.com/Montblanctech/Galen (concept DOI 10.5281/zenodo.21561962).
DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.24146102
Language: English
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7225793067
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