My impression is that translation from English is more common than translation into English (definitely true for science fiction) but I don’t know what the threshold is.
There’s at least one advantage to in-house translation. The odds are better of getting a translator who understands the concepts.
My impression is that translation from English is more common than translation into English (definitely true for science fiction) but I don’t know what the threshold is.
I have a sneaking intuition that this is more to do with the fact that English is the more common medium for most things from the outset than some other implied directionality.
A decent case-study of whether this is valid is to find some category of work that is frequently not in english by default and has a global audience. The most popular of such that springs to my mind is anime.
My only point was looking at the question of at what point something gets translation paid for by its publisher. I don’t know how much anime is translated by the company that produced it, and how much it gets translated by fans.
Maybe I’m missing something, but I don’t think translating the Sequences needs to be done by a single person or group, though consistency would be good.
Decent translations of single articles would be better than nothing.
Consistency would probably be pretty important for the Sequences. Eliezer frequently reuses phrases to reference previous ideas without having to explain any further. (Ex: phrases like cashed thoughts, leaky generalizations, how an algorithm feels from the inside.)
If people used different translations for these phrases, it would be much harder to read. Having those phrases repeated over and over acted as an extremely convenient way to express complex ideas.
A reasonable point. I suppose it’s possible to work on consensus translations for important words and phrases, but that might be even more work that getting one person to do the translation.
My impression is that translation from English is more common than translation into English (definitely true for science fiction) but I don’t know what the threshold is.
There’s at least one advantage to in-house translation. The odds are better of getting a translator who understands the concepts.
I have a sneaking intuition that this is more to do with the fact that English is the more common medium for most things from the outset than some other implied directionality.
A decent case-study of whether this is valid is to find some category of work that is frequently not in english by default and has a global audience. The most popular of such that springs to my mind is anime.
My only point was looking at the question of at what point something gets translation paid for by its publisher. I don’t know how much anime is translated by the company that produced it, and how much it gets translated by fans.
Well, either metric (compared against itself, anyhow) would still be useful for deriving the principle in question.
(And is under contract to actually finish the job within a reasonable deadline.)
Maybe I’m missing something, but I don’t think translating the Sequences needs to be done by a single person or group, though consistency would be good.
Decent translations of single articles would be better than nothing.
Consistency would probably be pretty important for the Sequences. Eliezer frequently reuses phrases to reference previous ideas without having to explain any further. (Ex: phrases like cashed thoughts, leaky generalizations, how an algorithm feels from the inside.)
If people used different translations for these phrases, it would be much harder to read. Having those phrases repeated over and over acted as an extremely convenient way to express complex ideas.
A reasonable point. I suppose it’s possible to work on consensus translations for important words and phrases, but that might be even more work that getting one person to do the translation.
As long as we allow edits, there’s no reason these can’t be settled on gradually, is there?