so why can't Logos translate from classical or I'm guessing, modern Greek too.

Larry Craig · 2025-02-27T01:54:42+00:00

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I am reading a passage from the 1915 ISBE, back in the day when educated people knew both Latin and classical Greek, and the author has a quote mixing Latin and Greek, and I had to highlight only up to the next Greek word if I wanted to get a translation. Sounds like a flaw to me. Logos is off to the races for so many new things. I wish they fixed some of the older things, but, hey, I'm happy with it.

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MJ. Smith

the translations services used don't support koine greek. If you know a solid translation service that handles koine greek suggest it to Logos.

Larry Craig

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1360158#Comment_1360158

I'm talking about classical Greek. But in the past when this has occurred too, Logos just says we don't do Greek. I'm aware of at least 5 kinds: classical, Attic, koine, Byzantine, and modern. Then you look at the languages Logos supports, there are nine with just the letter A. Amharic, Albanian, Aymara, Azerbaijani. That's like 31 Flavors not having vanilla. Or an auto repair shop that doesn't do oil changes. It will translate my Bible text INTO Greek, but it can't translate any IN Greek? That just doesn't make sense. I"m sure that's not the only language Logos won't translate, But Greek is highly relevant one for Biblical studies, one serious studies can often encounter. They can do Albanian but not Greek. Am I the only one who thinks this is bizarre? I wouldn't know where to look to find a translation service, but I am sure they didn't look specifically for all these languages. Ooh, ooh, we have to have Albanian. And they found that , but they couldn't find a Greek one. Sorry. This the world's premier Bible software company. Doesn't make sense.

MJ. Smith

It doesn't matter what Greek it is. The translating software only handles modern Greek. If you don't believe me, find a translating service that handles any of the ancient Greek dialects. The two services that I've seen Logos use do not. I'm sure they would be interested in knowing of a service that would do the translation. Note that the automatic translation services are heavily biased towards business texts as that is their primary business.

see note re: ancient languages at

Auto Translate Books – Logos Help Center

Bernhard

I think you are right. For fun, I just did some tests and Google Translate was able to translate text from the Greek NT and the translation into English or German seemed not great, but also not bad, DeepL was probably a step down from that. But still, this surprised me, as I am sure, that these engines are optimized for modern language. Reason is probably that they are training the translation engine on a lot of bilingual texts found online and that probably includes the Bible.

But then, I wouldn't trust a Google translated Bible, I am sure we would find many problems with longer texts. Also, with many of us being very particular about Bible translation choices, a "not bad" translation would potentially lead to a lot of negative feedback from the user base.

For fun, I also tried to translate Luther's September Testament into English (from 1522, a modern German would at least get the rough meaning of most of the text, after figuring out the changes in spelling/pronunciation). Google did a decent job, but DeepL had much more trouble.

DMB

Yep. We have a whole big library of greek-language books (Perseus), and Logos translate says nope (for the reasons MJ mentions). The quick work-around is to learn greek.

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