[Xmca-l] Re: Collective coordination of informal translations?

[Huw Lloyd]

That's an awesome project, David.  Thank you for the invitation.

If you want to get more hands on board in a way which isn't going to have
further problems for you in coordinating it, I could look into setting
something up online for you to allow people to make micro edits etc (like
distributed software development, or Project Gutenberg).  Perhaps something
like this is already available online.  I guess the problem with many
contributors is going to be consistency and register/voice, but there could
be many other benefits stemming from distributed edits/checking.

I am expecting to be pretty busy here unless things go pear-shaped.   The
sustained readings I get engaged in are, in all likelihood, going to be
curtailed to specific texts informing the mediation & memory project I am
working on (PhD), hence referencing Zinchenko, Davydov etc.

I'll let you know if I get the time to go through some major texts though...

Best,
Huw


On 6 June 2014 22:30, David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com> wrote:

> Huw (or anyone else interested):
>
> Since early 2007 our group (which varies between four and eight people) has
> been translating everything Vygotsky ever wrote that has been published in
> Russian into the Korean language. We're pretty slow, because only two of us
> know any Russian at all, and what we do has to be checked against various
> machine translations and with the Russian professors at my school. We do
> about fifteen paragraphs a week, and I expect to be doing this for the rest
> of my life (I'm fifty five years old).
>
> Because my Korean is so poor, we produce English texts as a by-product--for
> discussion. We also produce "boxes" every two or three paragraphs to try to
> help the readers (mostly public school teachers in South Korea) understand
> the text better. Four volumes have already been published in Korea, with a
> fifth volume coming out this month. We are meeting today (in a few hours,
> actually) to proof the galleys.
>
> But...we need somebody who has the patience to edit the English into
> something usable by other xmca people, or maybe even posted on Anton
> Yasnitsky's Collected Works project, if that is still on. That means
> cutting the transitional translations and the Korean final
> product, eliminating boxes that are mostly concerned with aspects of
> teaching in Korean public schools, and tidying up my awful English prose.
> Russian is not strictly necessary, although I can easily imagine that we've
> made a mistake or two along the way.
>
> Martin did a heroic job with (most of) Thinking and Speech, and I have
> tried to do it myself a few times, but I find that I am a very poor editor
> of my own work; I form a very clear idea of what the text says in my own
> mind and I don't seem to be able to get the words on the page to say it any
> more. Fortunately, my collaborators can usually step in at this point and
> put it all in Korean for me--but that means that the English translation
> remains a partial, transitional structure, like a wing of English text
> around which Russian and Korean word meanings flow and lift.
>
> So...if you are really willing, I could send you some of the files. Here's
> what we've got so far.
>
> a) Thinking and Speech
> b) Tool and Sign
> c) History of the Development of the Higher Psychological Functions
> d) Imagination and Creativity in the Child
> e) Imagination and Creativity in the Adolescent
> f) Creativity and its Development in Childhood
> g) Lectures on Pedology (Lectures One, Two, and Three Complete).
>
> Warning--these files are very long. We estimate the Lectures on Pedology
> (seven lectures) will be around eight hundred pages when complete, and this
> is one of the shorter books.
>
> David Kellogg
> Hankuk University of Foreign Studies
>
>
> On 5 June 2014 22:40, Huw Lloyd <huw.softdesigns@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Just wondering out loud a little: is anyone aware of collective efforts
> to
> > share informal efforts at translation, i.e. bits and pieces of larger
> texts
> > that have not made it through to official publications?
> >
> > I suspect once I get through the English writings pertaining to P.
> > Zinchenko, I may need to try and find time to learn some Russian.
> >
> > Best,
> > Huw
> >
>