Reading Through the Translation

Source Library has translated over 10,000 pages of Latin, Greek, Arabic, and Hebrew into English. The translations are useful, but they hide the original. Click any English word below, and the source word that produced it lights up on the other side. The alignment is computed on-demand by Gemini embeddings: the same model maps words from any language into a shared vector space, so it works across scripts, centuries, and languages without pre-computation.

Two words for happiness

Ficino’s De Voluptate (1457) argues that Plato distinguished between two kinds of positive feeling. Click “gladness” and “joy” in the English; they come from different Latin words. Click “pleasure”: it’s a third.

Light and shadow in the Hermetic creation

In the Pymander, Hermes Trismegistus describes a vision of the universe being created from light and darkness. Click “light” to find “lumen,” click “shadow” to find “umbra.” The Latin makes the cosmic polarity sharper than the English does.

Across alphabets

The same technique works across writing systems. Click “Zeus” in the English and “Διὸς” lights up in the Greek. The model knows they mean the same thing even though the scripts share no visual similarity. Click “sea” to find “θάλασσα.”

This works on any page in the library. The embeddings are computed the moment you click, with no batch job, no pre-processing. Every English word becomes a window into the source text. Not for the scholars who can already read the original, but for everyone else.