Well, I thought that I was pretty much done with the Life of John Damascene, but it seems not.
Over the weekend, I printed off the whole thing, and got to work with a pen, highlighting errors.
People forget the power of paper. Even in my days as a professional software engineer, I sometimes found it useful to print out a whole program on paper, and work on the listing with different coloured biros. Some of the younger staff raised their eyebrows; but you just cannot get a picture of the whole thing nearly so well on a screen. Paper is a valuable tool.
I was delighted to find that in general the translation reads well. There are quite a few typos, but nothing significant. Which is really rather pleasing, and not at all expected.
So I sat down today to process the print-out into the electronic text. My eye fell on the first query, in chapter one – a word underlined that read slightly awkwardly. So I looked again at the Latin and found that it did not fit my translation well. Then I went to look up the file with the Greek analysis; and I found that there wasn’t one. I hadn’t started saving the same working files to disk until chapter 5.
Any translation project is like this. You cannot just launch into it. You have to learn how to do it. You have to devise a way of working. When you start out, you don’t know what you’re doing, and what will work.
Which means that, when you have reached the end of the text, and learned how to do it as you go, you will almost invariably have to go back to chapter 1 and redo it, and a number of subsequent chapters.
A little investigating reveals the story. When I started this project, I originally intended simply to blast the old Latin translation through Google Translate and ChatGPT, interleave the results with the Latin, and make a quick translation that way. Not ideal, but better than nothing.
But then… scope creep. I obtained the Greek text, and started interleaving a machine translation of that also, just to keep things sensible. And then I started doing a real analysis of the grammar and syntax of the Greek, and working with that for each sentence.
In chapter 1, I was still really thinking about the Latin. By chapter 40 I had long since ceased to have any such idea.
Which means that the early chapters will have to be done again, properly, from the Greek; at least until I reach a place where I had started to do so.
I remember that something similar happened when I was working on John the Deacon’s Life of St Nicholas. It’s inevitable in any non-trivial piece of work; that by the time you reach the end, you’ve become a better craftsman than you were when you started.
Oh well. I shall call it “phase 2”.