KickstarterForum.org

I am looking for help with an idea, and thought of using kickstarter. Instead of drowning it my own self-doubts, i want to ask your opinion. In short, it's translating books from Latin into English.

Here's the background: I want to research a topic which brought me to one of Galen's works, De Temperamentis, which is not available in English. It is found in Latin, but OCR efforts fail miserably, due to old fonts, different letters, and typographical errors. Hence, it must be typed in manually and fixed by a Latin scholar, via Google Translate, or both. This takes a lot of time. (I wrote a bit of it in a Slashdot JE: http://slashdot.org/~Chacham/journal/505829.)

There is a project out there to translate the works of Galen (and others) from the original Greek (where available). The works are slow in coming, will cost a lot, and do not look like they will be released to the public domain.

I find it somewhat unbelievable that works that are in the public domain, that have been studied for nearly two thousand years, cannot be found in a modern format and language. And that's where i want to step in. That is, to make De Temperamentis, and possibly all of Galen's works, available for free in the public domain, on sites like archive.org or the Gutenberg project.

The problem is that this takes time, and time, unfortunately, costs money. Getting a Latin and/or Galen scholar to review and redact might cost a bit as well.

I do not have a project. I have an idea. I want to know if i should take it to the next stage and make it a project.

It sounds like an interesting idea. I think the hard part would be finding the individuals who care about this kind of project or who have a vested interest in seeing these works translated. I don't know much about the translation community or the types of professors or academics that use these works on a normal basis. Do you think they would want to see this project happen?

sbriggman wrote:It sounds like an interesting idea. I think the hard part would be finding the individuals who care about this kind of project or who have a vested interest in seeing these works translated.

Well, that's what i'm wondering. Is the idea of having the works available interesting enough to people who may not (directly) benefit from the works. And if so, would offering a reward be enough to get them to join the project.

sbriggman wrote:I don't know much about the translation community or the types of professors or academics that use these works on a normal basis. Do you think they would want to see this project happen?

That is something i need to ask. I wasn't what to ask first though. 1) Is this a possible project? 2) Is there Academic interest and how much would it cost?

Personally, I think that the backers would at least need to be enthusiastic about history or translation in general to be excited about the project. I would recommend asking a few people though.

I would take some time to email or have conversations with a few different types of potential backers: scholars, language enthusiasts, history buffs, and general backers to get their honest take on the project and then report back to us with your findings! I'll try to get a few more general backers to comment on this thread.

sbriggman wrote:Personally, I think that the backers would at least need to be enthusiastic about history or translation in general to be excited about the project.

A friend responded similarly. He said the free chopin music project (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/Mus ... e?ref=live) at least delivered music, but this project, ostensibly, delivers nothing to the average person.

sbriggman wrote:I would take some time to email or have conversations with a few different types of potential backers: scholars, language enthusiasts, history buffs, and general backers to get their honest take on the project and then report back to us with your findings!

I contacted a friend, a professor at a local college, who said he'll call me when he has time (with a few days). I'm hoping to find others through him, perhaps.

Okay keep us up to date as to how it goes.

It took a few days for us to talk, and then he did not seem convinced that there was not a copy in English at some library (he mentioned a local college library for me to check). He nearly scoffed at the entire of this project. Needless to say, the university's library only had the Latin that everyone else had.

In the meanwhile, i found http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/6004/. So, i might try Mechanical Turk instead, making the cost low enough to handle myself.

Like any business, kickstarter projects are about finding a market. It seems like there just isn't a large enough market to support your idea. It's a great idea, but I don't know if doing it as a kickstarter project is so chacham...

Well said @mlt45

@chacham - Wouldn't pay much attention to the fact that he "scoffed" at it. Another idea would be to approach Galen scholars that might need this work to cite in a research paper and be willing to pay you to translate it.

mlt45 wrote:It seems like there just isn't a large enough market to support your idea.

That's one option. The other option is that people would be interested, if they understood that it was truly missing. I am wondering if there is a way to survey that.