What should we translate next?
From The Taliesin Wiki
question: with so many mss. being available on the web by now, might it not be fun to use images from these as the starting point for discussion rather than beginning with transcriptions? - kiki.
Hi, Kiki! I'm delighted you've joined us! I thought about translating directly from the manuscripts, since I'm doing a lot of that in my research right now. However, I have invited some people to join this wiki who are not very experienced with Middle Welsh: I really want this to be a place where people who are just learning the language and who have not been lucky enough to be able to take a course in Middle Welsh can get some practice and some help with translation. I'm hoping this can become a community for people of all levels of experience with Middle Welsh. Particularly for the first text, I wanted to choose something that wouldn't be intimidating, and that would be fun for people with lots of Middle Welsh experience, but not impossible for people who are new to the language. That's why I chose to go ahead and use modern word breaks in the transcription. As you well know, reading from the manuscript comes with a whole bunch of other challenges: word breaks, minims, illegible handwriting, etc.
Having said that, though, I also don't want the site to bore people who do have lots of experience with Middle Welsh. Maybe we can set up two simultaneous projects: one from the manuscript directly, and one from a transcription. I suppose we could even have our Middle Welsh experts transcribe a text, and then the community as a whole can translate it. What do you (and other people) think? Gwendydd 16:26, 7 August 2008 (UTC)
As one of the less experienced people mentioned, both of those options sound good to me. I'm certainly not up to working directly from manuscripts yet!
I'm also still figuring out how this site works. I've been working on the first text block and have posted a few more sentences. Is this what you had in mind, Gwendydd?
-Gwernin
Hi, Gwernin! What you've done looks good! It does take a little while to get the hang of wikis, but don't be afraid to experiment. I have set this whole thing up for the community, not just for myself, so people are free to do what they want with it. Gwendydd 19:23, 8 August 2008 (UTC)
Hello - I'm also finding the site a bit tricky to use - in fact, I don't know whether this is how I'm supposed to add comments. One reason why I've not been visiting so often is that I can't find a way to get the site to tell me when additional material has been added. Also, it's a bit awkward that when I'm adding a translation, the page with the original vanishes. This last moan is minor, of course - I could translate in Word and then copy and paste. But am I missing something concerning updates?
Diolch!
Hello, Sanau Ddoe! I'm sorry it has taken me so long to respond - I'm just now resurfacing after the holidays.
There are a couple of ways you can get the site to notify you when there are changes. One is to "watch" pages. At the top of every page there is a tab that says "watch." If you click on that, the page gets added to your watchlist. When you are signed in, next to your user name it says "my watchlist". If you click on that, it will show you all the pages on your watchlist and when they were most recently updated. You can also set it up to send you an email every time a page on your watchlist is updated. To do that, click on "my preferences" (next to your user name). At the bottom, select "E-mail me when a page I'm watching is changed".
If you use an RSS reader, you can subscribe to an RSS feed for the website with this link: http://littlepeople.net/taliwiki/index.php?title=Special:Recentchanges&feed=rss
To get around the problem of not being able to see the original as you're translating, I just open the translation in a new browser tab or window, so that I can jump back and forth between the two.
Wikis are lots of fun, but it definitely takes a little while to get used to using them. Don't hesitate to contact me with more questions - I'd like to do all I can to make this as user-friendly as possible.
And I apologize for not doing more translating myself. I need to translate lots and lots of Middle Welsh prophecies for my dissertation research, so I devote all of my translating time to that. It gets rather tedious though, so I should remember to work on Breuddwyd Macsen instead.
Gwendydd 23:46, 8 January 2009 (UTC)
