Great points, thought provoking! I think LLMs are about to usher in a new era for academic translation. Obviously they have their faults, but philosophy in particular suffers to a much greater degree from language barriers than the layman might guess, so I think there’s a lot of room for improvement. In particular, many German and French authors have works that haven’t been translated yet, and, more relevantly, Chinese philosophy is still only tangentially related to European philosophy. When books do get translated, they often are translated with a significant delay, obviously leading to issues for people trying to form a scientific consensus.

I think the work of both great thinkers like Husserl and more underappreciated ones like Edith Stein would benefit greatly from LLM-assisted term-standardization and overall synchronized translation, with their original German-language works fed in alongside the translations we do have, for automated comparison purposes.

The academy is efficient, but IMO we’re about to see a scientific revolution in the humanities — aka cognitive science.