A colleague (currently in doctoral coursework in history) is working on translating historical primary sources about mid-20th-century North African anti-colonial revolutions. These are currently available only in French-language anthologies and are hard to get by interlibrary loan, but she's gotten copies and wants to translate them into English (and eventually into Arabic). I've suggested that she consider putting her translations online for pedagogical purposes.
Before I get myself in too deep on this, I'd love some guidance by people who know more about translations websites. (Once I've seen enough answers here, I'll probably just forward the URL of this discussion to her, and she can ask her own clarifying questions.)
- I'm aware of at least one existing site, Integrated History, that does precisely this-- English translations of Eastern European history sources-- but I'd welcome examples of others that present scholarly translations well, particularly for historical texts. (For this purpose, it's a plus if they're small-scale/solo-scholar/DIY in nature.)
- What are the intellectual-property/rights issues of translating portions of published texts from a published anthology, when the original sources being anthologized are "historical" in nature (i.e. not "literary" and thus subject to litigation from an author's estate)? The jurisdiction of first publication is France (or maybe Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco-- unsure on this), within the last 50 years. How copyright-risky would it be for her to put the French text online alongside her English and/or Arabic translations?
- Is the Integrated History copyright statement a reasonable model for a copyright disclaimer? I like my sources website's copyright statement, but it wouldn't be a good model in this case, since all my online sources are copyright-expired and/or US government documents.
- I know that TEI is the Real Scholars' Tool for encoding translations, but it's got a high learning curve and (from what I can see) mostly makes sense for larger-scale projects with a literary flavor, not small, short-term proof-of-concept projects. (I'd be open to hearing good arguments to the contrary, though.) If one were encoding one's translations in a future-compatible way, what's the minimal set of formatting tags that overlap between HTML and TEI?
- Since my colleague doesn't yet have a webserver setup of her own, I was going to suggest Omeka.Net as a way to get started quickly and without much technical overhead, with the thought that if she wants to expand or install custom plugins like TeiDisplay later, she can buy a webhosting plan then. Is there any reason I should be suggesting a tool other than Omeka for this project?
- Scholars' Lab folks: How mature is the TeiDisplay plugin? Where can I see it running?
Thanks in advance for your suggestions and comments.
