u/jstolfi

Help with a Cantonese "translation"

This is the beginning of an entry from the classic medical text Shennong Bencaojing:

丹雄雞:[味]甘,微溫。[主](女人)崩中,漏下,赤白沃。補虛,溫中, ...

For a discussion in another forum related to this text, I asked an LLM service (Gemini) to provide a literal reading, one-hanzi-to-one-syllable, of that text into modern Cantonese. This is what it produced:

daan1 hung4 gai1 : [mei6] gam1, mei4 wan1. [zyu2] (neoi5 jan4) bang1 zung1, lau6 haa6, cik1 baak6 juk1. bou2 heoi1, wan1 zung1. ...

Then I asked it to make as few changes as possible to make this text grammatically correct Cantonese. It produced

daan1 hung4 gai1: [mei6] gam1, mei4 wan1. [zyu2 jiu3 hai6 ji1] (neoi5 jan4 ge3) bang1 zung1, lau6 haa6, cik1 baak6 juk1. [zung6 ho2 ji5] bou2 heoi1, wan1 zung1, ...

People have questioned these "translations" because they were provided by an LLM, and I was told to verify them with humans. Unfortunately I cannot read Chinese, and I don't speak any Chinese language, including Mandarin and Cantonese. Could someone please tell me whether they are accurate, given the requests I made?...

Thanks in advance, --jorge

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u/jstolfi — 1 day ago