Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica

Speaker: Dr. James L. Zainaldin (Assistant Professor, Classical and Mediterranean Studies, Vanderbilt University)

Topic: Can AI Read Galen? Evaluating Machine Translation for Ancient Greek Medical Texts

Moderator: Ku-Ming (Kevin) Chang (Associate Research Fellow, IHP, Academia Sinica)

Time: April 17 th (Friday), 10:00-12:00

Venue: Room 701, 7 th Floor, IHP Research Hall

Organizer: Academia Sinica Grand Challenge Program “Creativity in the Age of Artificial Intelligence”

Co-organizer: Research Center of Cultural and Intellectual History, IHP, Academia Sinica

Abstract:

The rapid adoption of large language models like ChatGPT in academic contexts raises urgent questions for humanistic disciplines working with ancient languages. How good are these tools, really? Can classicists and historians responsibly use them? This paper explores these questions through a case study in translating the Greek physician Galen of Pergamum (129–216 CE), whose vast and varied corpus—much of it still untranslated—exemplifies the challenges and opportunities AI presents for scholarship on technical ancient texts. We examine translations produced by three major commercial LLMs (ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini), subjecting them to both computational metrics standard in natural language processing and close philological analysis by domain experts. Our investigation foregrounds methodological problems: What does translation “quality” mean when expert translators legitimately disagree? How do we evaluate accuracy for texts with no existing English translation? And does AI actually “translate,” or merely regurgitate human translations absorbed during training? By bringing computational and humanistic approaches into dialogue, we aim to develop frameworks for responsible AI integration in philological research—neither dismissing these tools nor adopting them uncritically, but understanding precisely what they can and cannot do for scholars of the ancient world.

(This lecture will be given in English, and no prior registration is required.)