I was recently reading an English translation of a non-theory-related non-fiction book that was published just a few years ago. Next on my list was re-reading Engels’ “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific”.

I can only describe my experience as the most severe whiplash; comparable only to reading the comments on a news thread on .world after checking the Lemmygrad thread.

I found myself reading so slowly. In 30 minutes I would have barely read a few pages, even though I was not struggling with the content itself.

I found that it’s just that the language is so needlessly impenetrable. So many run-on sentences, so many odd turns of phrases, archaic terms (not relevant to Marxist theory), and bizarre sentence structures.

I have never read the original German text nor any other language translation, so I don’t have a point of reference. I don’t know how much of it is Engels’ writing style, versus the translator’s 19th century English.
A translation written in 1892 was not written for English speakers in 2026.

My question is: Would these works not become so much more accessible if we had a modern English translation from the original text?

If this would be considered useful, how could we realistically realise this for all of the fundamental works from that time period?

  1. I imagine that finding and hiring a translator who is familiar with Marxism to re-do the translations would be extremely difficult and expensive.

  2. Community translations are probably not feasible as translation requires a very specific skill set, not just fluent speakers.

  3. Machine translations might be possible, but it’s crucial to not lose any specific terminology and not misconstrue the meanings of certain quotes and phrases. The translator (whether human or machine) needs to have a strong grasp on Marxist theory and history to not distort the meanings in the text.

I would really appreciate everyone’s thoughts and suggestions on this. Maybe I completely dropped the ball on this topic.

P.S.

This is not just in regards to “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific”, it’s just the experience that inspired me to write this post.
I’m not unfamiliar with reading theory from that time period nor Marx and Engels’ writings in general. I’m also not completely unfamiliar with 19th century English, I’ve read plenty of fiction written in that time period as well.

  • NotMushroomForDebate@lemmygrad.mlOPEnglish
    2·
    4 days ago

    This is quite interesting, but do you think it would be applicable to translation work? So if we use your example, the original version of the text would be the “draft” and it would be able to modernise the language? (not sure what it would be trained on though, maybe modern marxist texts?)

    I would assume it’s possible to reign it in so it doesn’t attempt to modify the content itself too much.

    • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmygrad.ml
      3·
      4 days ago

      Definitely, in fact there’s already translation happening internally. What I found out was that if you just gave original writing to the model, then it would often retain a lot of stylistic elements. What you have to do is neutralize the input first to strip out the style and simply keep the propositions. The first thing I tried was to get an LLM to try and rewrite the text in a neutral way, but that was spotty and sometimes it would drop some propositions. But then I had this idea to translate the text to Mandarin at HSK 5 level. It has completely different grammar, and the HSK5 forces it to use simple words and sentence. So that becomes the basis for the styler where it can now take what’s being said and write it using its own words.

      And it doesn’t really matter what subject the writer whose style you’re adopting wrote about. What the model learns is the speech patterns, the adjectives, and so on, and then it’s smart enough to apply them in the context. So, you definitely could train it on some modern writing, and then feed old text to it to produce modern prose.

      • NotMushroomForDebate@lemmygrad.mlOPEnglish
        1·
        4 days ago

        My only concern is that it could over correct and overwrite theoretically-relevant terms (proletariat, bourgeoisie, contradiction, labour power, work, etc.), which is why I believed it needed to be trained specifically on marxist texts to understand the relevance of these terms.

        I’m not sure how much of this would be addressed through training or simply just prompting. In any case there would need to be multiple runs of manual review.

        • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmygrad.ml
          5·
          3 days ago

          As with any LLM tooling, you do need a human to check over the work after, because it can’t guarantee correctness on its own. But it can save you a lot of time up front because now you just have to read through, and make sure things make sense instead of actually figuring out how to rewrite the text. So, manual review is key.

          Training the model on Marxist texts will help too, especially more modern ones that use the right terminology without the archaic language. Basically the way the training works is that you create pairs of paragraphs, one with input text and one with the target output. You create thousands of these pairs, and then the model gets scored on how closely it managed to produce the desired output from the input during training, and learns the patterns through reinforcement. So, if you mix some Marxist text in that will help it see the terms and know they need to be preserved.