Peter Kirby

Because of formatting issues, I will just link to my blog entry here.

Let me know what ya'll think or can bring to the table.

best wishes,
Peter Kirby

Roger Pearse

Thank you for the kind words. I also was contacted by the distributed proofreaders people. I didn't try to put any texts through them, tho, as I have found Project Gutenberg hard to deal with: emails ignored, etc.

One open source initiative I did was to translate the entirety of Jerome's Chronicle into English, by recruiting people online. This did work, but quality control was a problem, and fell almost entirely on me, which took ages.

I'm also interested in paying people to translate things. The question is what you have to offer to get it done, and where to find the money. At the moment a Swiss team is working on a critical edition of the 10 surviving books of Cyril of Alexandria, Contra Julianum*, with German translation. The Sources Chrétiennes people are doing an editio minor with French translation. I've been in contact and asked about an English translation; they're willing to consider the idea, and have a publisher in mind for such a translation**, but money is the desideratum. They've asked me where it might be obtained, which seems like a good question.

Does anyone have any good ideas on (a) where to find a translator able to handle Patristic Greek and (b) how to raise the money?

I know that Cyril is much beloved in the Greek Orthodox world (not least because I get people write to me about putting some of his works online in English) but monasteries don't seem to have lots of money. Are there any wealthy Greeks that way inclined?

All the best,

Roger Pearse

* The text is the main source for Julian the Apostate, Against the Gallileans (=Christians), and includes verbatim citation of about a third of the work, with refutations, much like Origen Contra Celsum.

** A scholarly translation would require substantial notes, but I care much less about these. In any case, if I were raising money, I'd want the raw translation to appear online.

Peter Kirby

I'll try Distributed Proofreaders and tell you what I find. Can't assume they'd be the same as they are an independent organization that simply gets funding and supplies texts to Project Gutenberg.

"The Online Books Page" is, I think, a better place to "advertise" your public domain books anyway, as the turn-around time is less than a week.

How much money is required?

You could perhaps find a translator by looking at professor pages.

Thanks for the comments, Roger. Does anyone else have a comment?

best wishes,
Peter Kirby