Well that was a good day’s work; starting late morning, continuing this afternoon with a couple of breaks, and finishing now — I’ve translated the remainder of Agapius, some 38 pages. The first draft of the whole work is done! Frankly I am delighted.
Thankfully I had scanned the page images before I began, presumably whenever I scanned the last chunk. Then I marked up the pages for scanning, corrected the OCR, and got a French text in an RTF file. Then I ran it through a programme that split it into sentences. I took the output and ran it through the machine translator. Then input both the French and the English into another tool to interleave automatically the French and English sentences. From there on, it was just a task of working through the file, making the English version correct, and removing the French as I did so. I suppose it took, what, seven hours? Hmm… that’s longer than I thought.
Not bad on a day when the outside temperature hit over 27C.
I’m done for today, now; the days when I could work to midnight on Friday and Saturday in order to work on the website are sadly behind me.
The next stage, when I get some time, is to go through these files, add page numbers, correct awkwardnesses, check things, and so on. That may be a couple of days work. But we’re getting close to a free, online English version of Agapius!