History of piracy by Philip Gosse (French edition)

[loot and scoot]

I was walking along the Seine in Paris this week and bought a first edition of Historie de La Piraterie by Philip Gosse. I ordered a modern edition in English so I wouldn't have to learn French. Has anyone read or compared earlier and later editions? Just curious if any information is left out or changed as editions are edited and republished.

Also, has anyone tried any of the phone apps for translation? I used the google app on my phone to order at local restaurants and it seemed to work well. Curious if there are any other experiences with other apps so I can compare earlier French passages with later English passages.

Thanks for any help.

 

[grossmusic]

I just translated an entire book from Spanish to English using Google Translate on my computer. Worked great. Very comprehensible. Can't speak to apps on a phone. My iPhone is a dinosaur. Just a phone pretty much.

Walking the Seine sounds like a good place to make your comparison!

 

[Darren in NC]

I just translated an entire book from Spanish to English using Google Translate.

How long did it take Tammy? How many pages? Was considering doing this myself.

 

[grossmusic]

How long did it take Tammy? How many pages? Was considering doing this myself.

Hi Darren - I'd guess it takes about the same amount of time to loosely translate as it does to then read it.

About 15 minutes per chapter I think. 18 chapters - not sure of word count, but normal novel length. So a little over 4 hours maybe. But I was working to keep the original format in hopes to maybe translate it for the author in full later, & that entailed some typesetting maneuvers throughout the process. So it should take much less time for you if it's just so you can read it for comprehension.

Of course, I had the book in an electronic format, so that made it quite easy-ish. And before I started translating I had to do a bit of technological preparation...

To make it effective, you don't want hard breaks at the end of lines or pages as you'll get from a PDF; otherwise you'll have words that go together treated as single words by the translator & it will skew the meaning. So if you start with a PDF or other fixed text, you'll want to export it to Word or any other program that will recognize the difference between the end of a line & the end of a paragraph & not get messed up by hard page breaks.

Once you have it in a state of flowing text in something like Word, just cut a big section, paste it into the translator, then copy the English version back into the text file where you left the cursor for the cut. The trick is to never cut too much. The translator can mess up if you paste more than say 300 words at a time. That makes it a bit more tedious than just taking a whole chapter in one big cut, though you could try that. Who knows - maybe an app version will work fine that way?

"Save" often as you do this!

You'll find a lot of confusion with pronouns between he, she, it from most languages, but otherwise it should be very readable for personal use.

Unfortunately this rarely works well with pre 19th-C research thanks to the "old" versions of languages. Modern translators don't know half the words, letters & spellings from the 18th C & back. Even if you type it in fresh, you'll have a lot of blips where the translator guesses wrong about words unless you already know their modern spelling, but if you knew that you probably wouldn't need the translator. Try translating old French to new English. The "s" that looks like "f" is a monster to figure out even if you speak some French.

Happy translating!

 

[Darren in NC]

Thanks, Tammy. I assumed you were using OCR with a regular physical book, and was curious how to go about in in that way. I appreciate your attention to details. :-)

 

[grossmusic]

I've done the OCR thing many times. If you have the right scanner & software, this can work well. I've scanned all my research books & documents into PDFs (we're talking tens of thousands of pages by now). Most scanners these days will do some OCR for PDF scanning. Cameras & screenshots won't. However, having the full/pro version of Adobe's Acrobat gives me an edge so my computer can recognize as much text as possible. Acrobat works great OCRing screenshot images & even digital photos of text as well.

If you don't have either an OCR printer or Acrobat, you may be able to scan to OCR'd pdf at a Staples or the likes for a low fee. Either way, book scanning definitely eats up time. I usually watch a movie or two while flipping the pages & laying it out on the glass.

Translation becomes a lot iffier this way as of course not all text perfectly/accurately scans. Depends on a lot of factors.

No doubt Project Gutenberg has a more sophisticated process. Fortunately, Gosse's "Pirate's Who's Who" is available free since 2006 on archive.org by Project Gutenberg.