turn any book into the torah
jps torah appreciation post
while rteadign the torah from seferdica or idk but the online jps tanakh i found it very easy to read. the easy english translation which jps is knopwn for is part fo that, but the other is how each verse is so cleanly separated out in its own line with plenty of spacing, and i thinkl thats also due to the (at this point in my life) sadly incomprehensible hebrew lines coming righ tto left on it.
So I had this thought: why arent more books distributed in a format like this? surely Crime and Punishment would be easier to read for someone like me with a short attention span if sentencesd came in this easily digestible format and with hebrew translatiosn stacked on them for the same visual break and aesthetic quality.
So I (want to ) come up with softtware that does just that. I htink the main issue here is the copywriting/ pirating issues so im not sure yet how to go around that. but my goal is to get a .txt file for a book i want to read and write super simple software that just breaks down each sentence, translates it to english, and renders it as biblical verses just like sefaradicas website
and at the very least ill be able to see if its really the text being broken yup into small chunkis or the simple english or the fact that i know most of the stories already which help with this reading.
lets call it targum.io or some other stupid name like this
—> add on: ther next tier of this is to actuallyt dumb down the english of each sentence to the level of simple english that JPS uses. now you may be thinking: we still need to make sure the text as a whole is coherent, and using a very cheap fast model to do the reprhasign will probably not work. but have you read the jps torah? it lowkey feels like youre dyslexic and reading the same sentence slightly differently 10 times over for some stretches. so i dont think a dumb fast llm will make it much different. If anything itll bring it closer to the jps torah style
(btw to be clear this is NOT a dig at JPS. I think their translation is great and brings the text much closer to the modern english speaker, i think that’s really awesome. the torah really just is written weird like that sometimes but what can you expect from a 3000 year old book)