Chrysostom’s “First sermon” now online in English

I’ve finished translating Chrysostom’s first sermon into English from the French of Bareille.  As far as I know it hasn’t previously been translated into English.  It’s here.  I place the translation in the public domain, so do whatever you like with it, personal, educational or commercial. 

Of course it would be far better to have this translated directly from the Greek, but I think I will save my funds for texts that don’t exist in Bareille. 

It was quite interesting to see that Google translate, which I made use of, has got still better at handling French.  It still needs intervention, but the work this time was minimal.  I see that Google has also added a page of “Translators Toolkit” which I must explore.

I do have a few tools which I have written myself which help me to work with translating.  The most important of these is a little utility which takes a paragraph and splits it into a sentence a line.  I then paste that into Google translate, copy the resulting translation back, and the tool will interleave the sentence of text with the Google translation.  It makes working on the text very easy, as I don’t have to look back and forth between  two solid masses of text.

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5 thoughts on “Chrysostom’s “First sermon” now online in English

  1. I keep hearing about Chrysostom. I don’t know much about him, but he is often poistively cited on blogs I visit, so I was a bit let down by this sermon, as I know you were also.

    Thanks for translating though. I hope it doesn’t put you off translating Chrysostom in the future.

  2. Re: “little boy” —

    It wouldn’t seem weird for a newly ordained priest to call himself a “kid” in his first sermon, even if he had been ordained quite late. A newbie is a sort of kid, in relation to his profession.

    It’s also part of the classic narrative of someone “making it”. You get grown musicians or politicians describing themselves as being as something like ‘I’m a little black boy from the Delta’, ‘I’m just a small town boy’, ‘Thank God I’m a country boy’, etc…. I’m not sure that it’s so much about humility as your source thought, although it may start there. As rhetoric, it’s more a sort of offer to the audience of identification; “I have made good but I’m still just like you, and I’m one of you. I understand your situation, because we’re from the same kind of background.”

  3. I was disappointed; but we probably must be wary of being anachronistic, and probably it was expected of priests in what was an unfree society to thank their patron effusively.

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