Our goal is to complete the English translation of the Pali Canon and Commentaries, and make the entire Pali Canon and Commentaries freely available online and easily searchable.
The project has now launched!
Thanks to a supporter’s generosity, the Dīgha Nikāya Commentary (Sumaṅgalavilāsinī) is being translated, and will be complete by the end of 2025, with the first pages of translation due to be published shortly.
The next proposed text is the Majjhima Nikāya Commentary (Papañcasūdanī). Full details on the costs of this three year project are available from info@palitranslation.org
The project looks good, but it seems like they are not in the “know” about what needs to be translated and any type of focus. Furthermore, it would be good if we call collaborate and get together and use chatgpt to conquer one book at a time. These days, 4o is pretty good and available to most people.
It seems associated with sutta central but they are not a commentary supporting website. In the end, I’m not sure if anything was ever completed by them.
Ven Sujato has expressed the desire to add the commentaries on SuttaCentral. Hence his (technical) support for this project.
From what I hear the site mentioned in the OP was more aspirational than actual. It looks like they do have one text in progress. But considering their academic orientation I doubt they would support using ChatGpt to do translations. But that’s just my own assumption. I’ve heard that in academia even using digital dictionaries is scorned by some still.
That is good.
But, he is so against AI, he will never accept it. AI is definitely a good base to start with and then human translate from there. Considering it is probably 90% good, it can save a lot of time trying to figure out which words to choose and the word order for sentence structures.
Later, when I have some time next month, I might organize a group and standards on how to prompt and bang it out one book at a time. 5 people would be good. Need to do line by line when using chatgpt because cannot 100% trust it. I’ll work out the prompt and the formatting. we can make a new thread for the project when I have time to start it. I think MN should be the highest priority. I’m not sure why translators are reduplicating stuff that is already translated. Maybe because it is easier to do.
And that is why chatgpt can be useful as a first-base.
Well, he will never accept an AI translation. But that’s not what the folks in the Pali Translation Project are doing.
If you are planning on feeding the text to ChatGPT line by line, I’d suggest working with Bhante Sujato to break the Pali into segments in a way that could be used in the future on SuttaCentral. Since you are doing that work anyway, if you agreed with his method, that would speed up (potentially) getting at least the root of the commentary up on SC.
Perhaps you are planning on this already, but it would make sense to automate the process of giving segments to ChatGPT so that in a year when there is a better model you could just run the whole job again