BTW, the character limit on this forum is extremely frustrating. What's that all about? And is there a way around it?

erinja:The Flemish Esperanto League sells The Count of Monte Cristo in its online shop.

Cool. That's probably his best book. Though the Three Musketeers is also a fantastic read.

erinja:Some Dickens has certainly been translated.

The torrent that I downloaded has "A Christmas Carol" and "The Battle of Life." Not sure what else might be floating around, but he definitely has several other great books.

erinja:But that stuff that's still in copyright - no, I don't think so. It's not easy to get permission for a legal Esperanto translation. My understanding is that The Lord of the Rings was probably done without permission (printed in Russia, I believe).

That's interesting regarding The Lord of the Rings. Is that still under copyright? Seems it would've passed by now, but copyright law is pretty tricky.

erinja:Crowd sourcing of translations - quality control is a real problem. As I mentioned before, enthusiasm and talent (and free time) don't necessarily all come in the same person.

Seems a tier system might work. Make sure the translators are at least generally competent and knowledgeable about the language. Have them do a translation and pass it along to a team of editors who are fluent or near-fluent to critique the translations and get them ready for the big show as it were.

I believe there are two translations of the LOTR, an unofficial (illegal) version done in Russia, and an official version done by William Auld (which is simply out of print). In fact, I seem to recall reading about a push, a few years back, to issue a new print run of the estate-approved (Auld) version. I didn't track the story, though, so I don't know if that ever came to anything or not.

That's interesting that they actually approved an Esperanto translation, but I guess this particular case is unique considering Tolkein had at least some tenuous link to the language.

How is the Russian translation? Good?

Seems a tier system might work. Make sure the translators are at least generally competent and knowledgeable about the language. Have them do a translation and pass it along to a team of editors who are fluent or near-fluent to critique the translations and get them ready for the big show as it were.

Agreed, a tiered system tied to demonstrated competence would work well. This is what Distributed Proofreaders does with its proofreaders. The way I imagine it, such a task would be similar in many respect to their process, with a few tweaks.

Optimally, several people would translate the same sentence more than once; perhaps differently. When that round is complete, people would vote on which rendering was best. This would repeat at the paragraph level. Additional passes would be made to look for renderings that are jarring... specialized criteria could be set for certain projects, etc. Also, technical notes, translator commentary, and well justified variant translations could all be captured; and if desired, selectively retained. So, in many respects it could resemble an open source project. I think this would work well for the vast majority of literary works.

As a deeply religious person, I'd be more than a little nervous about using this approach on primary religious texts--my own, or anyone else's--without specialists on hand among the volunteers. It would feel like hubris, I think, otherwise.

On an unrelated note: SPX, is your screen name a referenced to Sequenced Packet Exchange? See, IPX/SPX if you don't know what I mean. I'm just curious.

Has Sun Tzu's Art of War been translated into Esperanto?

eojeff:
Optimally, several people would translate the same sentence more than once; perhaps differently. When that round is complete, people would vote on which rendering was best. This would repeat at the paragraph level. Additional passes would be made to look for renderings that are jarring... specialized criteria could be set for certain projects, etc. Also, technical notes, translator commentary, and well justified variant translations could all be captured; and if desired, selectively retained. So, in many respects it could resemble an open source project. I think this would work well for the vast majority of literary works.

I think that sounds great and would no doubt be effective. If several people have to translate every sentence though it sounds like it would take a massive team. I wonder how big most translation teams are for Esperanto works.

I would personally love to be part of a translation team. Obviously I can't do it right now because I am just a beginner. But I dunno, maybe in a year I could be ready to be a lower-tier translator?

eojeff:As a deeply religious person, I'd be more than a little nervous about using this approach on primary religious texts--my own, or anyone else's--without specialists on hand among the volunteers. It would feel like hubris, I think, otherwise.

It may be a case of you doing it or it just doesn't get done. Most of the primary (i.e. main) texts for the major religions have been translated, so you wouldn't have to worry about that. But if there is a particular writer whose works you're interested in translating then I'd say go for it.

eojeff:On an unrelated note: SPX, is your screen name a referenced to Sequenced Packet Exchange? See, IPX/SPX if you don't know what I mean. I'm just curious.

Ha ha. I actually am at least aware of IPX/SPX. About 11 years I graduated with a degree in computer network engineering, though I have since gone in very different directions.

It actually has to do with the pseudonym I am published under: Soren Patrick Xavier.

When you say you're religious, I expect you're a Christian (though of course I could be very wrong). I am not, but the name was taken from a number of figures in Christian history.

Soren - Soren Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher
Patrick - St. Patrick
Xavier - St. Francis Xavier, the first(?) missionary to Japan

Another thought:

It may be worthwhile to focus on works that haven't been translated into every major language known to man.

I understand that it's kind of a milestone to have the major classics translated into your language--and I support that--but I am also interested in reading books that I just can't get in English.

What are some great books in French, German, Chinese, Japanese, Italian, Arabic, Swahili, etc that I just have no way of reading right now because I don't know those languages? Those are the books that I am most concerned about being translated into Esperanto.

For those of us who only know English and (some) Esperanto, I think that we also should seek out works in our own language that are maybe lesser known and not widely translated, but important and potentially of interest to foreigners who don't have access to them.

How about Agatha Christie? I know some of her Poirot stories were written pre-1929. . .