Rumi
Landmark translations of the Sufi poet/mystic Rumi from the acclaimed interpreter of the Tao Te Ching.Jonathan Star has assembled selections of Rumi's verse in a treasury that spans the poet's life and includes his most celebrated and poignant work. It is an enchanting volume of classic Eastern thought that creates an exhilarating experience for all readers.
Stats for nerds
0recommend
5mentions
3people
2021–2025years
40% neutral60% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- There's a saying that the solution should be 10x better, which I like to measure along the qualityspeedprice angles. So if you can solve it 10x faster and keep everything else the same, that's great. Or something like half the price, twice the speed, and 2.5x the quality, that works too.
You've quantified this - 20x cheaper, 1.2x better, 0.2x faster ~= 5x better. That's a "nice" rating, not quite a "wow". Enough for people to switch, but not yet at the level where they'd be idiots for not switching. But AI will be become cheaper and faster and it sounds like you can engineer it to get into 10x improvement. Your Show HN didn't really make the quality difference obvious.
I'd say the next step is finding your customer acquisition channel. Google will be big because they own a bunch of channels - Google Lens, google.com, GSheets etc. You can't compete on these. Microsoft Teams has a worse product than Slack but conquers the market because MS Office is such a powerful enterprise channel.
You can probably compete against DeepL, see how they're reaching out to customers.
Translation is used a great deal in the world today. I personally make apps, we use localization tools like Lokalise and Loco (confusingly, https://localise.biz/). These come with auto-translations, but they kinda suck. And since they're probably API-based and care a lot about pricing, you can try pitching your tool to companies like this.
There's a huge gap in the Indonesian market if you can tackle that. Indonesia is the 4th largest population in the world, has thousand of dialects. So it's a big market, and English is taught in schools there in a similar manner that American schools teach Spanish.
Here's a sample of something we had trouble with, "Don't forget to share your referral code or link so you can get attractive bonuses." becomes "Jangan lupa membagikan kode referral atau tautan Anda agar Anda bisa mendapatkan bonus-bonus menarik." A correct translation would be "Jangan lupa bagikan kode atau link referral-mu agar kamu dapat bonus menarik."
There's a critical mistake here: "Anda" means "you" in the same way that "They" means "she" in English. It's excessively safe, and the capital A is also grammatically incorrect, so it becomes a clear watermark that this is a robotic translation. The Google translation basically becomes "Don't forget to share forward your referral code or Your connection so that You may obtain various bonuses."
Claude and GPT both have the same issues. Gemini gets this right, but it's aware of the bad translation and tries to justify that the bad translation is suited for formal. DeepL is popular in Indonesia because it's the most accurate so far.
Anyhow, even if you're not proficient in Indonesian, you might look into similar huge markets. Does Brazilian Portuguese make sense? Arabic is widely spoken too.
Speaking of middle eastern languages, Coleman Barks's translation of Rumi is one of the most popular in the world. It's also heavily botched. As a Muslim, I know that it doesn't even really make sense in context even though I speak no Persian. But Barks is an excellent poet in his own right and rewrote Rumi as his own poetry.
The Arabic world is a rich source of poetry, and I find that AI has a lot of potential to getting it right, but you have to tell it to keep the meaning and feel of the original. While western "poetry" is seen as romantic, Arabic poetry may also be similar to rap battles with two parties roasting one another. The religious type have both love and roasting. Al-Ghazali is a favorite and a major reason I got into Arabic. Translations are a relatively new thing; much of the early Islamic nations just chose to learn Arabic because it was less effort than translating.
Sorry for the rant, hope it helps.
- Rumi for sure. Coleman Barks' translation is the most popular, but it's also wildly inaccurate.
Many either love it or are dismissive of it, but I consider it a form of poetry on its own. e.g. Barks replaces Rumi's lust for God with lust for a lover. As a redditor put it, "he just makes stuff up." Barks is a brilliant poet though, and I feel he enhances Rumi in his own way.
Many accurate translations have difficulty carrying the poetic parts. But my favourite is Jonathan Star's interpretation.
- This is what religious and philosophical books are for. I don't suggest reinventing the wheel; it was invented thousands of years ago. People go on about the benefits of meditation, but many religions emerged from it, and were subsequently built on top of those foundations.
I don't want to promote a specific religious book, but you could look into modern interpretations of past work. Rumi's poetry is built atop Sufism, atop Islam, which is atop the Abrahamic religions. Coleman Barks does the Rumi translations that many quote, but in doing so he morphed it to something no longer Rumi. If you find something that makes you uneasy, don't follow it, or look deeper into where the inspiration comes from.
James P Carse is also really good at digging deep and across multiple religions. I'd recommend that as another starting point. His most popular work is Finite and Infinite Games, which is well suited for modern society.
- Of renderings instead of actual translations? One of the most notorious examples is Coleman Barks’ "translations" of Rumi that Shambhala put out. Barks does not actually know Persian, and his versions of Rumi are based on existing English translations along with his own personal inspirations.
- Coleman Barks at least has a sense of rhyme, but when it comes to the original Rumi, it is indeed very different. It’s hard to find good (accurate) Rumi translations,
