Subject: Re: [Announcement] The Alice Translation Has Moved And Changed

From: Nick Nicholas <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 11 Oct 2002 12:05:22 +1000

For the record and all,

I think Jorge taking control of the text and all is a good thing. I 
think I am likely to take huge issue with stuff he's done (I have 
already winced at a couple of things I saw in it last year), but it 
is for the good that, as And said, Jorge issues a text, it gets 
comments and feedback, and Jorge takes responsibility for the 
contents. And that he be allowed to propose oddities in use, and see 
who likes them. It is cool, not evil, for Jorge to own a text; that's 
why I avoided getting involved in collaborative translation --- 
because I know my ego.

And it's because I know my ego that I forced myself to undertake my 
two major projects --- my forthcoming mediaeval Greek book and 
Khamlet --- collaboratively. But it's easier to collaborate on a 
scholarly book than on a translation, and easier a translation than 
original literature. And with Khamlet, it was two people, clearly 
dividing up the work (me verse, Andrew prose), with two or three 
other Klingonists making email comments.

Btw, the review for Khamlet did not go smoothly. (No disrespect to 
Mark, who was the main reviewer.) Major stylistic reforms did get 
proposed and accepted (I did what John, I think, said once I did in 
Lojban in the early '90s: if someone pointed out I was making a 
mistake when posting my mountains of text, I would simply reset a 
switch, and keep posting mountains of text.) However, one reviewer is 
still not on speaking terms with Andrew because he thought he was 
being ignored. The review took two years to get 3 acts done; we then 
rushed through the rest, because a rival version of Khamlet got 
published unbeknownst to us. And when I revised Khamlet for the 
second, commercial edition last year, it was just me. Much Ado went 
much smoother in its revision; but it was me and one reviewer, and me 
on my own doing the revision for publication.

So my experience has been that collaboration works for two people on 
a translation, and maybe one reviewer, but not more. Now, I don't 
want to naysay, and it's not like we had wikis back then (we had cvs, 
but it hadn't occurred to us.) Nor do I wish to pooh-pooh the 
initiatives Robin set up. But I do believe one person should take 
final responsibility for text. Until and unless there is a commonly 
accepted Standard Lojban, but you know, I don't see how there will 
ever be one that legislated for the entire language. Including style. 
Which I think *is* too much to expect.

I think the reasonable thing to do is what we've done in Klingon for 
my stuff, and what Esperantists sometimes do, and should do more 
often: one person authors, one person reviews, and the author bears 
responsibility for accepting or rejecting comments.

This isn't a massive prob for collaborative translations of the Alice 
type. We can easily make it: one person does a given chapter; nothing 
gets published unless every chapter gets reviewed by one other 
person; the original person vetts the proposed changed; and one 
person goes through the entire text and unifies it stylistically. 
That last person gets called the editor of the whole thing. And, if 
they have any sense, the stylistic guidelines they impose on the 
whole text get negotiated with all the collaborators beforehand.

One more thing. The Bible is a hodgepodge of authors --- four levels 
of authorship in the Pentateuch, for example. So there's no intrinsic 
problem with it being stylistically inconsistent. :-)
-- 
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* Dr Nick Nicholas, Linguistics/French & Italian [email-masked] *
University of Melbourne, Australia http://www.opoudjis.net
* "Eschewing obfuscatory verbosity of locutional rendering, the *
circumscriptional appelations are excised." --- W. Mann & S. Thompson,
* _Rhetorical Structure Theory: A Theory of Text Organisation_, 1987. *
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