Translation tag team
While reading the entries to our LitWit Challenge: Translate The Great Gatsby into Filipino, the light bulb went on in my head. Why don’t we do the whole shebang, not just the first and last few paragraphs? We could translate one chapter each—it’s a short novel—then put them all together, get an editor to polish the draft, and publish the translation online (or find a publisher to produce low-cost editions for the mass market).
After the Scott Fitzgerald we could translate other books whose copyrights have lapsed—Pride and Prejudice, Great Expectations, Crime and Punishment, Sherlock Holmes, Madame Bovary and so on—and make them easily available to Filipinos who like to read but prefer to read in Tagalog.
Let’s think about this.
We’re accepting entries to the translation contest until tomorrow at 11.59pm.
Answers to questions you might be asking, unless you wandered onto this site purely by accident >>>
October 23rd, 2009 at 00:44
Good idea! I think I’m going to enjoy doing the Sherlock Holmes translation.
October 23rd, 2009 at 18:13
I’d love to read Pride and Prejudice in Filipino. Tapos yung crackfic niya, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies!
October 23rd, 2009 at 23:21
Ako ay sumasang-ayon.
October 23rd, 2009 at 23:31
I like the translation of any Balzac novel. How come its so hard to find any classics in Filipino, but chinese and japanese translations are aplenty? Maybe we can cooperate and do it ourselves. I’m game.
October 25th, 2009 at 02:00
My only concern is consistency and cohesion; it’s going to be a hodgepodge of translation styles.
October 25th, 2009 at 08:29
the geek alter ego is screaming: oh, yesh! i’ve translated a whole french website quite easily once with good results using yahoo’s babel fish!!! should we translate all the classic electronic books in project gutenberg???