For those of us who are bilingual and want to self-publish books, I feel that there is a vast, untapped market for translating public domain works.
I translate old German folk tales and I know that @SimonRoyHughes@beige.party is doing the same for Norwegian folk tales. But who else here is active in the field, and what precisely do you translate?
And what are juicy things to translate other than folk tales?
#PublicDomain #Translation #amwriting
I think “AI” is the newest player who takes old writings and makes them it’s own. It’s good to make some old things new again, but not all things. I think between the bible and Shakespeare all plots have been covered. Everything else is an iterative derivative plot with setting changes.
I am extremely skeptical that “AI” would do a good job with this. Old folk tales have a lot of local cultural, historical, and cultural context which the translator needs to take into account and explain. AI systems, in contrast, would turn this into a language they know best - which is largely Reddit posts of the last decade.
And the notion that “the Bible and Shakespeare have covered all plots” to be extremely reductive even for the English language. It gets rather insulting when you consider cultures outside of the Anglosphere, or “The West” in general.
@melsaskca @juergen_hubert you’re missing out on the literary traditions of everything outside the dead white male author western tradition. You should read literature by people outside that narrow demographic.
That’s a fancy statement and it sounds good. It’s quite general and not close to the truth at all, but it sounds good.
