[Foundation-l] Wiki translations of Greek and Roman texts

Thu Oct 14 15:09:00 UTC 2004

Hello everybody,

I'm a German student living in Paris for one year. I've learned Latin and
Ancient Greek at school, so occasionally, I like to glance into a bilingual
book. But sometimes it's impossible to find a bilingual version of a
particular work, say, some books of Seneca; or they are extremely expensive
or just badly translated. While I'm not good enough to translate an entire
Latin book, it'd be great fun to translate some parts, and I'd think that
many people who once learned ancient languages share this feeling. After
all, this way you could actually USE what you've learned. Fans and Texts of
ancient literature are hopelessly scattered through the Web, one text here
and part of a translation there.

Could it be possible to set up a Wiki containing some
Latin/Greek/Arabian/whatever philosophy (or other content) whose copyright
has expired for a long time - be it by typing in old editions or by taking
over some Gutenberg content - and displaying it one paragraph per page,
giving the viewer the possibility to translate it into his native language?
I guess some specific features would be helpful, such as allowing two
translations in the same language to coexist (call them "English version,
showing John's translations where possible" and the same thing for Jim), as
there will never be "the one correct version". In addition, it would be nice
to create a bilingual PDF for printing.

As I'm a student living in a small chamber with only two hours of Internet
access from Monday till Friday, it is impossible for me to create such a
thing. There will be lots of other ideas and feature requests; for me it
doesn't matter if this will be a new project or integrated into Wikibooks or
something completely different. I just wanted to present this idea; maybe
someone "mightier than me" likes it, too: using your knowledge of humanism
to actually exert humanism, translating some of the oldest and greatest
works of mankind to be accessible free of charge by nowadays' mankind. 

Have a nice day,
Viktor.

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