Let’s do something big!
A side thread, during a rather distracted week on the Proudhon seminar list, has involved the possibility of tackling the untranslated portions of Proudhon’s writings in a collaborative setting. I’ve bounced this notion off of a few friends and allies, without a lot of response, but having someone else suggest it reminds me how much I really want to get the job done. There are tools for Mediawiki that should make the two-step process of transcribing and then translating the works. The structure of a wiki ought to make it easy for the participants to also develop a collection of pages dedicated to the specific translation problems associated with these older, specialized texts.
I would love to see this effort result in a copy-left Collected Works, in English and perhaps in some other languages (particularly as the ally who suggested it is not a native English speaker). But I would also love to see radicals with no particular knowledge of French get a chance to dip into the parallel world of “Proudhon in the original.”
I would love to hear from anyone who would like to participate in any phase of a group translation project. I’ll start putting a site together next weekend, assuming life cooperates.
Then again, I would love to hear that readers are doing something entirely different, something big and ambitious, but more in line with their particular passions.
