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There’s some Sanskrit texts that don’t have English translations that I’d really like to read so I was going to use an LLM to create translations. Does anyone know how well LLMs handle Sanskrit or have any suggestions? Are any particular models better than others? Especially because I know that ancient texts sometimes use different dialects of Sanskrit and have different challenges.

The one I’m mostly interested in translating is called the Moksopaya, here’s the Sanskrit on GRETIL: https://gretil.sub.uni-goettingen.de/gretil/1_sanskr/6_sastr...



The Madras Sanskrit College in collaboration with IIT-Madras is working on a exclusive LLM for the Sanskrit language - https://madrassanskritcollege.edu.in/

From Mylapore to the World: The Story of India’s Sanskrit LLM - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AB_Bic7RqOg

PS: What translations of Yoga-Vasistha/Laghu-Yoga-Vasistha have you read/have had access to? This is one of my favourite philosophical texts and i am curious to know more.


Yesterday in HN "what are you working on", dr_dshiv presented SourceLibrary [1] which has tons of machine translation of beautiful texts.

Here's my "Let Me SourceLibrary That For You" using their Librarian search which presents the "The Yoga Vāsiṣṭha (The Expanded Mokṣopāya)" [2]

ETA: My apologies, I went deeper and the links therein are scans/ocr of English translations of that text. The library does have other Sanskrit translations, but not of that?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48889335

[2] https://sourcelibrary.org/librarian?thread=6a56c578a50845441...


No, LLMs do not handle low resource / low corpus languages, including Sanskrit well.





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