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Open Source Esperanto Books

de Alkanadi, 2015-oktobro-25

Mesaĝoj: 8

Lingvo: English

Alkanadi (Montri la profilon) 2015-oktobro-25 15:21:50

What do you think of the idea of Open Source Esperanto books? They would be written and edited by the esperanto community.

eojeff (Montri la profilon) 2015-oktobro-26 02:34:44

I'm not sure I follow you question exactly. Do you mean:
  • Original literary compositions in Esperanto? If you do, you might try starting something useful in Wikibooks. Alternatively you could blog about it and host the book on github using a simple markup language like Markdown.
  • Do you mean translations of texts from a national language into Esperanto? If you do might try Wikisource as community translations are encouraged on that site. Alternatively, you might pick a book on Project Gutenberg and start translating it into Esperanto. If you share your results with others you might generate interest.
By "open source" in this context do you mean a copy-left license for the resulting work such as Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) or similar?

Personally, I would love to see the Encyclopedia Britannica (1911) freely translated into Esperanto, but that would take small army of contributors the better part of a lifetime.

Alkanadi (Montri la profilon) 2015-oktobro-26 08:24:49

eojeff:I'm not sure I follow you question exactly. Do you mean:
  • Original literary compositions in Esperanto? If you do, you might try starting something useful in Wikibooks. Alternatively you could blog about it and host the book on github using a simple markup language like Markdown.
Yes, this is what I mean. Wikibooks is for textbooks. I was thinking about original novels that would be produced by the Esperanto community.

I would probably make my own wiki style site instead of using github.
By "open source" in this context do you mean a copy-left license for the resulting work such as Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) or similar?
Yes. This is what I mean. It would be public domain. Creative Commons Attribution (CC)
Personally, I would love to see the Encyclopedia Britannica (1911) freely translated...
Good idea, but I was thinking about original novels, rather than translation.

Miland (Montri la profilon) 2015-oktobro-26 09:06:26

Given the creative effort required to write a whole book, I imagine that writers would hope to make a little money from their work, not just further Esperanto. For that reason, I doubt that you could make many such books available free of charge within an authors' lifetime, except with special permission.

Alkanadi (Montri la profilon) 2015-oktobro-26 09:08:55

Miland:Given the creative effort required to write a whole book, I imagine that writers would hope to make a little money out their work...
What if 100 people wrote 1 sentence a day.

se (Montri la profilon) 2015-oktobro-26 09:34:41

Alkanadi:What do you think of the idea of Open Source Esperanto books? They would be written and edited by the esperanto community.
Yes, you could do not. The English newspaper in my country did that decades ago. As the company was promoting the newspaper, it went round the country to do a BIG BOOK. Each province was placed the BIG BOOK for a few days and those interested in story writing could write not more than 200 words in the book, and it should be continued the story.

The newspaper each day published the new entry, those who are interested bought the paper, read and went to continue the story. One person was allowed once only, With names below the paragraph. The editors did the editing when the tour was completed and published the book. The sales was good as those who participated in this programme would buy a few copies for gift too.

This project can be done in regional scale or country as you wish.

Bemused (Montri la profilon) 2015-oktobro-26 09:47:23

Alkanadi:
What if 100 people wrote 1 sentence a day.
Brilliant idea.
The never ending story, or constantly evolving book.
Anyone is free to contribute, but each contributor is limited to eg. one sentence per day, and the story unfolds in directions that no single writer could ever imagine.

sudanglo (Montri la profilon) 2015-oktobro-26 11:39:36

As a general point, Alkanadi, the translation challenges that have appeared in the English forum have often demonstrated that the most elegant translation emerges from the independent efforts of several people working on the same text.

What seems to often happen is that several contributors may come up with the same solution and then one contributor may try a different tack and this is self-evidently better.

So multiple inputs are good, but they just provide an environment in which the most elegant solution can be discovered.

The problem with a lot of Esperanto publishing IMHO, is that one poor sod devotes an enormous amount of effort to produce a translation and that this then goes straight into print with little pre-publication editing. Whereas if the text had been farmed out for critical review first then a much better product would have been achieved.

In these days when it is so simple to send a text in multiple copies right round the world in seconds there is really no excuse for not producing a cooperative effort, though ultimately a single person (the editor) has to decide on the final form.

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