austraLasia
#1766
A collaborative 'first'.
Pat yourself on the back!
ITALY-INDIA-USA-AUSTRALIA...20th February
2007 -- We cannot be sure where
all the contributors came from, but at least from the nations named here.
It is possible to claim a little 'first', I think, in that as the result of
collaborative work using the Boscowiki 'translation' invitation, a number of
people worked on a dozen 'collects' which have not appeared before in any formal
printed version, and some indeed have not appeared before in English. The
exercise took little more than a week.
Fr Mike Mendl, from
New Rochelle, was the first to put up a tentative effort to adjust some earlier
versions of collects for recently beatified members of the Salesian Family. His
aim was to present them in good, flowing contemporary English where they begged
for this, and to translate several that were not in English at all (both the
original Latin and the Italian of these was available on sdb.org). Then Fr Chris
Woerz from the other side of the US saw them and decided to work at presenting
these in a respectable and attractive layout, adding in material on the life of
each individual - and a photo. In the meantime, confreres from around the
English-speaking world hopped in and offered some careful suggestions - a comma
here, a new line there, an altered phrase there again and so forth. Mike then
took all these from the wiki and brought it all together. I've converted them to
pdf and put them on Bosconet.
The final result, a Word
file, amounted to 9 mb which was far too much for anyone to be able to download,
especially if on a poor line. Open Office Writer's default capacity to
save as pdf brings them down to a little over 2 mb. Still difficult for
some to download, but most will manage. The 'Salesian Collects' package
(remembering these are just a handful of them to do with recent 'Beati') can be
found on Bosconet under the What's New section beneath recent news items (home
page).
What the effort does prove, of course, is that we
now have the collaborative tools and some willingness around not just EAO but
other parts of the English-speaking world to achieve small tasks like
this.
Within
a week or two I hope to be able to announce a much more daring but potentially
satisfying venture which will call for collaborative effort across all the main
languages of our region - it will require the translation of phrases (perhaps
about two dozen, no more) and one or two paragraphs - maybe no more than one
hour's work for someone in Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese, Tetum, Bahasa, Korean,
Thai - at least those. Should readers of Hindi and Kanada be interested,
they could also be part of it. Should you be interested in helping, you may flag
that interest even at this early stage.
In the meantime -
pat yourselves on the back!
_________________
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