I have now run all the way through John the Deacon’s Life of St Nicholas and made a first pass at translating it. However I find that I will have to redo the first two chapters, which I attempted last year, as they are no good. This is rather disconcerting, considering the sheer hard graft that I put into them, but there’s no doubt about it at all. Fortunately I can reuse some little notes I made on difficult words.
It’s interesting that, when translating, you truly know when it is right. If it is easy, it is usually right. When you are struggling, ten to one but you are producing rubbish.
I have looked into collating some of the manuscripts. I am slightly shocked at the meagre results of a search for software to assist in collation. Considering the sheer number of people engaged in the study of texts, this is quite a surprise. I can only suppose that this is caused by the inability to program of the majority of those engaged in the humanities. I don’t think this is something that I will try to fix!
What has become clear is that collation is a time-consuming task outside my objective here. I probably won’t do more on this.
There are some programs which are fairly widely used for collation, but they are all rather complex:
Collate (requires Perl) https://www.quasillum.com/study/collate.php
CollateX (https://collatex.net/)
DV-Coll (rather old now) http://donnevariorum.dh.tamu.edu/toolsandresources/collation-software/
Traherne Collator (for page images) https://oxfordtraherne.org/traherne-digital-collator/
and previously mentioned:
Juxta (easy to use, but I can’t currently access this site) http://www.juxtasoftware.org/
Chysocollate (new, fairly straightforward, maybe the most useful) https://cental.uclouvain.be/chrysocollate/
Classical Text Editor does collation too
Thank you both!
Someone should give you an honorary doctorate, Roger.
That’s very kind!