Source Library has translated over 10,000 pages of Latin, Greek, Arabic, and Hebrew into English. The translations are useful, but they hide the original. Click any English word below, and the source word that produced it lights up on the other side. The alignment is computed on-demand by Gemini embeddings — the same model maps words from any language into a shared vector space, so it works across scripts, centuries, and languages without pre-computation.
Reading Through the Translation
Click any English word to see the original that produced it
17 April 2026
Two words for happiness
Ficino’s De Voluptate (1457) argues that Plato distinguished between two kinds of positive feeling. Click “gladness” and “joy” in the English — they come from different Latin words. Click “pleasure” — it’s a third.
Marsilio Ficino, De Voluptate (1457)loading embeddings...
Latin
PLATO igitur, ut ab eorum principe initium faciam, cum animum in duas partes distribuisset, mente scilicet ac sensum, menti laeticiam & gaudium attribuit, sensibus voluptatem.
English
Plato, therefore (to begin with him as the leader of these philosophers), when he had divided the soul into two parts — namely, the mind and the senses — attributed gladness and joy to the mind, pleasure to the senses.
Click any English word to see its source.
Light and shadow in the Hermetic creation
In the Pymander, Hermes Trismegistus describes a vision of the universe being created from light and darkness. Click “light” to find “lumen,” click “shadow” to find “umbra.” The Latin makes the cosmic polarity sharper than the English does.
Hermes Trismegistus, Pymander (Ficino, 1505)loading embeddings...
Latin
Cum haec dixisset, mutauit formam, & uniuersa subito reuelauit. Cernebam enim immensum quoddam spectaculum, omnia uidelicet in lumen conuersa, suaue nimium atque iucundum, quod intuentem me mirifice oblectabat. Paulo post umbra quaedam horrenda obliquè deorsum ferebatur.
English
When he had said these things, he changed form, and suddenly revealed all things. For I saw a certain immense spectacle, namely everything converted into light, exceedingly sweet and delightful, which as I gazed upon it wonderfully pleased me. A little later a certain dreadful shadow was carried obliquely downward.
Click any English word to see its source.
Across alphabets
The same technique works across writing systems. Click “Zeus” in the English and “Διὸς” lights up in the Greek — the model knows they mean the same thing even though the scripts share no visual similarity. Click “sea” to find “θάλασσα.”
Aratus of Soli, Phaenomena (~270 BCE)loading embeddings...
Ancient Greek
Ek Διὸς ἀρχώμεσθα, τὸν οὐδέποτ' ἄνδρες ἐῶμεν ἀῤῥητον· μεσταὶ δὲ Διὸς πᾶσαι μὲν ἀγυιαί, πᾶσαι δ' ἀνθρώπων ἀγοραί, μεστὴ δὲ θάλασσα καὶ λιμένες· πάντη δὲ Διὸς κεχρήμεθα πάντες.
Transliteration
Ek Δios archōmestha, ton oudepot' andres eōmen arrēton· mestai de Δios pasai men aguiai, pasai d' anthrōpōn agorai, mestē de thalassa kai limenes· pantē de Δios kechrēmetha pantes.
English
From Zeus let us begin: him let no man leave unspoken. Full of Zeus are all the streets, all the marketplaces of men, full is the sea and the harbors. Everywhere we all make use of Zeus.
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This works on any page in the library. The embeddings are computed the moment you click — no batch job, no pre-processing. Every English word becomes a window into the source text. Not for the scholars who can already read the original, but for everyone else.