Interdisciplinary team translates historic German cello educational book using generative AI

Artificial intelligence elevates education accessibility

Article by Leigh Cooper, University Communications and Marketing.
Photos by Chris Giamo and Garrett Britton, University Visual Productions.

For their co-authored book on the history of teaching string instruments, Miranda Wilson and two colleagues read every book they could find about playing violin, viola, cello or double bass. They turned to Google Translate for help with tomes unavailable in English.

“I read so many completely brilliant books and articles that had never been translated into English and I thought we were missing out,” said Wilson, a University of Idaho professor of cello and music history. “I realized, if I didn’t translate these books, nobody else was going to.”

One book published in 1929 stood out for Wilson, “The Mechanics and Aesthetics of Cello Playing,” by celebrated cellist and Professor Hugo Becker (1863-1941).

But diving straight into a translation was impossible. The book was written in German, and although Wilson was trained in the language, she didn’t feel experienced enough to tackle a translation of century-old German. Additionally, the book’s specialized terminology would have challenged a hired translator.

First, there’s the cello lingo, which includes instrument parts and classical music jargon. Second, when Becker wrote his book in the early 1900s, he wanted to incorporate information from the emerging scientific field of physiology. To write about the anatomically correct way to play the cello, he hired physiologist Dago Rynar as coauthor for his expertise in anatomical vocabulary.

For assistance translating the 100-year-old jargon-filled German book into a sharable teaching aid in English, Wilson turned to the artificial intelligence experts at U of I’s Institute for Interdisciplinary Data Sciences (IIDS), which provides data and computing support for U of I researchers.

AI avengers assemble!

In Fall 2024, IIDS launched the Generative AI Fellowship to help faculty members use AI in their research. Michael Overton, associate director of IIDS, oversaw the first cohort of four participants.

“We have a good technical team and the knowledge to assess the ethics and biases aspects of AI, but we started this fellowship to learn how scholars wanted to use AI,” he said.

Upon joining the fellowship, Wilson sat down with Director of IIDS Research, Computing and Data Services Luke Sheneman, who was excited about the opportunity to translate Becker’s book. For Wilson, the chance to translate the book meant creating a new teaching tool.

“The more I read, the more I felt that the profession needs this,” Wilson said. “Becker worked with some of the most famous 19th-century composers, such as Johannes Brahms and Clara Schumann, and throughout the book he writes about the interpretation of their music, advice that he must have gotten from the composers themselves.”

The team started with a poorly scanned PDF version of the book, and Sheneman and IIDS web developer John Brunsfeld used numerous generative AI techniques to translate the contents. Generative AI is artificial intelligence that learns from existing content to create new content including images, videos, text, audio or computer code.

First, the AI team converted the PDF scanned images of the book’s pages into text, because AI specializing in language translation requires text files. They automatically ran each scanned page through a large “multi-modal” computer vision model, which takes images, speech and video and converts them into a different form of communication. In this case, it converted PDF images of words to text and kept them in German.

Then the big lift — translating German, cello jargon and anatomical terminology into English. Sheneman’s team tasked five different large language AI models to individually translate the book from German into English.

“I used an ensemble of large language models because all the models have distinct strengths, weaknesses and biases based on how they were trained,” Sheneman said. “When they get stuck, they all sometimes make stuff up.”

Sheneman needed to provide the language models prompts — commands that tell the program what the user wants — and he learned to include context about the book’s content and audience. He discovered that asking AI for help with writing better prompts improved translation.

“Translation’s hard,” Sheneman said. “There’s a lot of subjective decisions that are made and a lot of it’s done in the context of your audience.”

When complete, all the first translations were different.

“There were some hilarious mistranslations,” Wilson said. “In a passage about how you should not make an unpleasant sound, it got confused by a German colloquial expression and translated it as ‘you must not be a celery munching cellist’.”

Finally, Sheneman pulled out a powerful reasoning model, which spends time “thinking” about the content it’s given. The model looked at outputs from the original five AI models, identified where they disagreed, analyzed those points of contention and resolved the disagreements.

Although not perfect, the translation was astonishingly accurate, Wilson said.

“I later asked an expert in German translation if there were any mistakes. And he said, ‘no, this is flawless’,” she said. “I was shocked because I had never had an experience of artificial intelligence translation that I hadn’t had to change a lot.”

Access to education and technology

As part of the IIDS fellowship, faculty members and AI experts discussed ethics and responsible uses of AI.

“If I had had a huge grant, I would have hired a human translator to do it,” said Wilson, when comparing the $150 price tag of IIDS’s work to the thousands of dollars a translator would have cost. “But we are making knowledge more accessible. A lot of people who are teaching cello don’t have access to teaching tools, many simply can’t afford them. Becker’s book is such a gift, and it’s tragic to me that it’s not better known.”

There is one English translation of Becker’s book, but it is on delicate microfilm and hard to access. Wilson plans to publish her translation as an Open Access educational resource e-book through the U of I Library, accessible for the public. The book is in the public domain meaning no copyright will be violated.

For Overton, the success of the generative AI fellowship led IIDS to continue the program in Spring 2025.

“If someone’s interested in using AI but they’re scared because they don’t know how to use it, that’s exactly the kind of person I want to work with. I hate barriers when it comes to accessing technology, especially in science,” Overton said. “Your ideas should be your only limitation.”