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

[David Kellogg]

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
>