{"id":299,"date":"2007-12-15T11:28:24","date_gmt":"2007-12-15T17:28:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/neonostalgia.com\/weblog\/?p=378"},"modified":"2007-12-15T11:28:24","modified_gmt":"2007-12-15T17:28:24","slug":"new-english-translations-of-untranslated-ancient-texts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/2007\/12\/15\/new-english-translations-of-untranslated-ancient-texts\/","title":{"rendered":"New English translations of untranslated ancient texts"},"content":{"rendered":"<p align=\"justify\">As an experiment I have\u00a0used my own heavily-taxed salary and commissioned a translation from Arabic of the <em>Commentary on the Nicene Creed<\/em> by the 9th century Melchite priest, al-Majdalus, using a commercial translator.\u00a0 This is expensive, but I have read that this is how the <em>Ante-Nicene Fathers<\/em> translations were made.\u00a0 It will be interesting to see what the quality is like.<\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\">Naturally I need to get the money back, if I am to do this again. So I will try to publish a printed version, and sell copies to institutions. Once the cost is covered, I&#8217;d want to get it online somehow in some manner that doesn&#8217;t preclude sales. But the markets are different; online is everyman, while the academic needs his page numbers and ISBN.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\">If this could be made to work, then perhaps we might do some more.\u00a0 Translators from Arabic seem fairly available.\u00a0 None of the big histories in Arabic are in English; Agapius, Eutychius, Bar-Hebraeus, Al-Makin, etc, although French translations exist of most of them.\u00a0 I estimate that Agapius is around 90,000 words, and it would cost about $10,000 dollars to have a translation made. Now that is more than most of us can spare (!). But it isn&#8217;t really such a huge sum of money, is it? It isn&#8217;t that long ago that a laptop cost $5,000, for instance. If one could sell the volume at $100 a go, and\u00a0could sell\u00a0100 copies &#8212; I&#8217;ve no idea if one could! &#8212; the sum would come back there and then.<\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\">Is it possible?\u00a0 Could we do an ANF for the new millennium?\u00a0 Should I look for subscribers?\u00a0 How do I market the volumes to the sort of institutions that might buy them?\u00a0 Over what period do the sales come in?\u00a0 There are a lot of questions here.\u00a0 But I&#8217;m going to dip my toe in the water and see what happens.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As an experiment I have\u00a0used my own heavily-taxed salary and commissioned a translation from Arabic of the Commentary on the Nicene Creed by the 9th century Melchite priest, al-Majdalus, using a commercial translator.\u00a0 This is expensive, but I have read that this is how the Ante-Nicene Fathers translations were made.\u00a0 It will be interesting to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_hide_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_featured_image_duplicate_dismissed":0,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[16,23,31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-299","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-eusebius","category-information-access","category-arabic"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/299","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=299"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/299\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=299"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=299"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=299"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}