Hello Werner, hello everybody, This is a very interesting question, and I have read the replies with great interest. I admit that in this context I am sceptical that a LLM will be of much use taking into account that very probably you will have to proofread everything anyway.
In my opinion it is (at least in such a special case as the NR) still the best approach to have a human German native speaker with a solid musical background and knowledge do a new translation based on the English NR as a reference. It is a huge task anyway. If it would be welcome, I would volunteer to do at least part of this. I am a retired professional musician who has used LilyPond a lot in the course of the years, and like that I could give something back to the community. What do you think? Best Hajo Am Mittwoch, dem 22.07.2026 um 10:21 +0000 schrieb Werner LEMBERG: > Folks, > > > While you can press a button in most web browsers to translate > English > pages on the fly, due to the many musical and LilyPond-specific > technical terms there are inevitably flaws, that make the results > misleading. Such online translations also don't give you translated > PDF manuals. > > I thus wonder whether a guy with LLM experience could help with > updating the German translation of the Notation Reference – or > rather, > generating a complete translation from scratch, since the German > translation is severely outdated. Today, websites like Google > Translate provide translations (both German-to-English and > English-to-German) that are nearly perfect even for quite complicated > grammatical structures, which still amazes me. > > This is intended as an experiment that could start with a few > chapters, say, to find out whether such an approach is feasible. Of > course, we would have to discuss the conditions for the LLM to get a > good result. In spite of the grammatical quality I expect that a lot > of technical terms will be mistranslated; we thus have to proofread > the results (I volunteer for that). > > What do you think? > > > Werner -- Hajo Bäß Bogengasse 2 51588 Nümbrecht Tel.: +49 2293 3911
