A few weeks back I finished translating the cheiroballistra manuscript, first into English, then into my native language, Finnish. I did the Finnish translation to see how well Greek translates in Finnish, and indeed, Finnish was much easier to work with than English, because of richer grammatical rules of Finnish. The second reason was to give the text a second go and see if anything changes. A few corrections were made to the English-language version during the Finnish translation round, but nothing really important changed.
Anyways, here are the translations:
In retrospect the cheiroballistra manuscript was fairly easy to translate even with only two basic Greek courses at the university under my belt. Granted, I did practice quite a bit before starting this translation, but mostly because several years had elapsed since I attended the courses. With this experience under my belt I have to keep on translating short passages from the other artillery manuals to keep improving my Greek skills.
A full translation had started to make sense when I was working on the final iteration of the components and final assembly. Basically I wanted to avoid noticing after the fact that others had previously translated critically important passages in a manner that just happened to serve their own purposes or hypotheses. For example, some words can be translated in a generic way, or in a highly specific way. Depending on the context either of these could be (mis)used to make the text fit better in the image one is trying to portray. There are also occasional ambiguous phrases, where interpretations are necessary, and skewing towards one's one hypothesis is unavoidable.
In my opinion Wilkins' (1995) English translation is of higher quality than that of Marsden (1971). This is because Wilkins makes a better attempt at trying to conserve the nuances, such as passive imperatives, of the original text in the English translation. Both translations convey the basic idea just fine.
As for interpretation of the text: there were two important places where I reached the different conclusion that those before me:
- The width of the pittarion: I think there might be a corruption there, as 1,5 dactyls would make things fit perfectly.
- The construction / material of the handle: it may have been of wood or wood/iron composite.
See the translation for further details.