Garbage in… Greek out? Experiments with Deepseek using OCR’d Italian containing embedded Greek.

The letters of the 6th century sophist Aeneas of Gaza have been sitting in a folder on my desktop for a month or two now, and I want to make some progress with making a translation into English. It’s not a big text. Each letter is only a short paragraph, and there are only twenty-five letters. So the whole text would fill less than a dozen pages perhaps. I have the 1962 edition with Italian translation by Lidia Massa Positano, which is more than a hundred pages. There seems to be a rule that editions of tiny texts can be obese! I have never forgotten the Gerlo edition of Tertullian’s “De Pallio” – a very short text of a page or two – which filled two lengthy volumes. But Gerlo published in 1940 in the Netherlands, and it may have been expedient for him to be engaged in such a project at that time. Anyway the Positano edition is not that daft, and consists of an introduction, the Greek text, the Italian translation of each letter with commentary and footnotes. At some earlier point I…