In which a member of our community has built a system to unlock a whole host of old Hebrew and Latin texts:
This started as an offhand question.
I was chatting with Claude about some obscure Hebrew books related to my interest in the history of astronomy and cosmology. One of them contained a firsthand account of encounters with Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler.
I started by asking what Claude knew about the book from reviews, catalogs, and other online references. The information was sparse. Then I thought: why not go to the source?
Knowing that Vox Day had used AI extensively for translation work, I asked Claude what it could do with a scanned PDF.
The answer seemed almost too good to be true.
So I tested it.
“Here’s a 250-page PDF. Translate it.”
That didn’t happen.
Claude explained that the PDF would need to be broken into smaller batches. I would have to upload each section separately, start a new chat for each batch, run a translation prompt, and then manually stitch everything together afterward. It even suggested shell commands to help.
That also didn’t happen.
Instead, over the next five days, I used Claude Web and Claude Code to build the functional scaffolding that eventually became my translation pipeline. As an experiment, I kept it completely code-free at first. I wanted to see how far I could get simply by describing what I wanted.
The answer turned out to be: surprisingly far.
Read the rest about how the translation pipeline was constructed and find the link to the growing compendium of ancient and medieval texts at AI Central.