I am back to working on this project.

I had said that I was taking a break back in August, but then actually finished the first round of editing in late October, I believe, though without mentioning it on this site. My uninterrupted break, then, lasted about five full months. Since re-starting, my efforts have been concentrated in scrolling through the Greek text of Nikiforos Kalogeras and my own translation, side by side, and taking note of (and tallying) all of the edits, citations, manuscript comparisons, etc. that I have to do. This way I can once again have a report that I can publish that will both let anyone online follow my editing and, more importantly, keep me accountable to the tasks that I have set before myself.

Just this morning I finished tallying the work that needs to be done. I am holding off on publishing it yet, because I want to figure out a way to keep track of what I accomplish each day, just like I had done when I was using the Translation Progress Report (specifically on page 2, the “Daily Details Page”). It might mean restructuring the data and therefore also reworking the report in Looker Studio.

As I ponder that, I thought to myself that it would probably be good to try to finish a single book of Euthymius Zigabenus’ commentary in its entirety, rather than do the whole commentary in waves, as I have been doing until now. I decided to choose the commentary on Philemon, because it is only 7 pages in Microsoft Word and has, as you can guess, the fewest edits and things to be done. And, when I say “in its entirety”, I mean to say that when I finish it, it will be ready for publication (I mean that the content of the text, including any/all footnotes, will be ready for publication; not the page layout, etc.).

There is also another exciting little development (semi-related to this project) that I need to tinker with before posting about, but it might be of interest to some of my readers. It is something that I tried at least twice before (years ago) without even succeeding in beginning due to technical issues that I did not understand. But now, with the assistance of AI, I was able to overcome the hurdles that hindered me. Stay tuned for that.

P.S. A note on AI use for this project. I have not yet begun using AI to help me in my translation. So far, every time I have consulted AI on complex grammatical constructions (again, not for this project, but for other things I was working on), it gave me a good answer that seemed promising, but it invented the sources that it was citing. At some point, I am going to HAVE TO start using it for this, when I inevitably struggle with Greek that is beyond my current capabilities. Hopefully by then, the models will be better and will not hallucinate as much. I might just need to have multiple ones (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, etc.) running the same prompts to compare and see which ones are actually correct. We will have to see how that goes.