Tag: Information access

From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A couple of snippets only.

Firstly, an email tells me that someone is producing audio versions of some of the ante-Nicene fathers, here.  Apparently they have backing music, which sounds unusual.  I have a vague idea that other people have done some of this, but it can only be a good thing!

Secondly, via Ancient World Online, I learn of a new site of dissertations online, the The Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD).  I was unable to work out who and what and why from the corporate-speak on the site, but there are two search engines for it:

Scirus ETD Search
A comprehensive scientific research tool from Elsevier, Scirus ETD Search provides an advanced search that can narrow results to theses and dissertations as well as provide access to related scholarly resources.
VTLS Visualizer
This is a dynamic search and discovery platform with sophisticated functionality.  You can sort by relevance, title, and date.  In the current implementation, faceted searches are available by language, continent, country, date, format and source institution.  Additional facets, such as subjects or departments, can be added if desired.

Anything that makes these items more readily accessible is good.   Many, perhaps most dissertations are of limited value.   But they often contain unpublished translations, and so can be valuable long after the author has forgotten about them.

I’ve just done a search on “english translation”. 

This thesis [by C.R. Hackenberg, 2009] offers, for the first time, a complete Arabic-to-English translation of the debate between Nestorian Patriarch, Timothy I (a. 779-823), and Muslim ‘Abbāsid Caliph, al-Mahdī (r. 775-785). An analysis of the various editions of the Arabic and Syriac versions of the debate is included. The primary editions of the debate consulted for this thesis were Samir K. Samir’s critical edition of the Arabic text named MS 662 of the Bibliothéque Orientale à Beyrouth, and Alphonse Mingana’s edition of the Syriac text named Mingana 17 taken from the Convent of Alqosh in northern Iraq. In analyzing the various editions of the debate, the goal is to establish the primacy of the Syriac text in its relationship to the Arabic text. This analysis is largely based upon the existing work of Hans Putman. In the translation and analysis of the debate, significant differences between the Syriac and Arabic versions of the debate are noted. In addition to the translation and analysis of the debate, a general introduction to Timothy I and his accomplishments as Nestorian Patriarch as well as an outline of the proposed purpose of Timothy’s text during late antiquity and the medieval period are offered.

I downloaded it at once!  It is followed by a load of stuff of no special interest, including stuff about machine translation.  Then I found this:

A Critical Edition of Anastasius Bibliothecarius’ Latin Translation of Greek Documents Pertaining to the Life of Maximus the Confessor, with an Analysis of Anastasius’ Translation Methodology, and an English Translation of the Latin Text (Neil Bronwen, 1998)

Anastasius Bibliothecarius, papal librarian, translator and diplomat, is one of the pivotal figures of the ninth century in both literary and political contexts. His contribution to relations between the eastern and western church can be considered to have had both positive and negative ramifications, and it will be argued that his translations of various Greek works into Latin played a significant role in achieving his political agenda, complex and convoluted as this was. Being one of relatively few Roman bilinguals in the latter part of the ninth century, Anastasius found that his linguistic skills opened an avenue into papal affairs that was not closed by even the greatest breaches of trust and violations of canonical law on his part. His chequered career spanning five pontificates will be reviewed in the first chapter. In Chapter 2, we discuss his corpus of works of translation, in particular the Collectanea, whose sole surviving witness, the Parisinus Latinus 5095, has been partially edited in this study. This collation and translation of seven documents pertaining to the life of Maximus the Confessor provides us with a unique insight into Anastasius’ capacity as a translator, and into the political and cultural significance of the commissioning and dedication of his hagiographic and other translated works in general. These seven documents will be examined in detail in Chapter 3, and compared with the Greek tradition, where that has survived, in an effort to establish the codes governing translation in this period, and to establish which manuscripts of the Greek tradition correspond most closely to Anastasius’ (lost) model. In Chapter 4, we analyse consistency of style and method by comparison with Anastasius’ translation of the Historia Mystica attributed to Germanus of Constantinople. Anastasius’ methodology will be compared and contrasted with that of his contemporary John Scotus Eriugena, to place his oeuvre in the broader context of bilingualism in the West in the ninth century. Part II contains a critical edition of the text with facing English translation and historical and linguistic annotations.

That’s the stuff!

After 9 pages, tho, I found that I needed some means to exclude all the Chinese stuff!  I tried the other search engine, with advanced, and excluding “chinese”.  Interestingly this gave better results.  Some of the theses are very old — there was one on Numenius by Kenneth Sylvan Guthrie.  There was a translation of portions of John Tzetzes’ letters and histories in another.  But I was much less sure whether there was actual material for download — the Tzetzes talked about “add to cart” rather than giving a link.  But returning to the first engine, and doing a similar search, I did find the Tzetzes here.  But the search engine then went wonky!

Very interesting, and deserving much investigation, I suspect!

Share

Is ambiguity in ancient texts a problem for the translator?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

At work today one of my colleagues had received a particularly hasty email from a customer.  The sentence was somewhat difficult to parse, and could be read in two ways.  But we worked out what it meant.  And then — for, unusually, my current colleagues know who I am — he asked me this:

When you’re translating an ancient text, how do you deal with ambiguity?

It’s a very good question, isn’t it? 

The first point that struck me is that mostly ancient authors wanted to be read, and to be understood, and consequently wrote in order to avoid ambiguity.  A word might have two meanings, but the rest of the sentence would be so phrased as to rule out all but one choice.

I think that here is rather less ambiguity in ancient texts than we might suppose, as we translate them.  Isn’t it the case that, in the majority of the situations where we find ourselves with ambiguity, it is because we can’t work out what the thought is, that the author is trying to express? 

I remember wrestling with a translation of the 6th century Syriac scientific author, Severus Sebokht, On the Constellations.  The subject matter — “climates” and stars and so on — was unfamiliar, and I found myself in the dark, sometimes, where a sentence could have more than one meaning, word for word.  But the real problem was that I simply didn’t know enough about the subject to choose the right possible word meaning.

When we find a word that could be translated several ways, we usually find that the context decides which word that should be.  By “context” we mean that the word is part of a sentence, and the sentence part of a paragraph, and the paragraph is devoted to putting forward a train of thought.  All this naturally tends to reduce the possible multiple meanings of a word, or a set of words.  The author probably did not intend to be ambiguous, after all, although, with some of the more allusive Byzantine writers, you do wonder!

When we do find a word which is clearly ambiguous in the original, how do we handle it?  In this case we must consider the possibility that the ambiguity is deliberate, and therefore needs to be conveyed to the reader in English.  The best solution is to use an English word that has the same dual sense.  Habeo in Latin has a considerable range of meanings beyond have, own; and have itself can carry more than one meaning in English.  But in most cases we will not find a convenient equivalent.  In that case we must resort to footnotes; translate the meaning that is most important, and indicate the overloading in a footnote.  Indeed even when a single ambiguous English word can be found, it is probably best to indicate in a footnote that the ambiguity is in the Latin or Greek. 

For footnotes, of course, exist primarily to allow the translator to anticipate the criticisms of the reviewer — “surely any schoolboy would have known that blah blah…” — and prevent such captiousness.  Whether such preventative footnotes are of use to the general reader may sometimes be doubted.

A further element reducing ambiguity in ancient sentences is the language itself.  English is a weakly-typed language, to borrow a computer idiom.  A word may be a noun or a verb, and little or nothing in the form of the word itself indicates its grammatical purpose or position in the sentence.  But Latin and Greek were more strongly typed. 

In English you can reverse the position of words, and it alters the meaning.  “Sextus killed Marcus” and “Marcus killed Sextus” are not equivalent statements, not least from the point of view of Marcus and Sextus. 

But in Latin this is an impossible problem.  “Sextus Marcum occidit” and “Marcum Sextus occidit” are of near identical meaning, differing only in emphasis.   Consequently the scope for ambiguity is reduced. 

But of course ambiguity does not disappear simply because of grammar!  The second word anyone learns in Latin, amas, has two different meanings — the second person singular indicative active of the verb amo meaning “you love”, as in amo, amas, amat; but it is also the accusative plural of the noun ama, the fireman’s buckets.  “amas amas” is a perfectly legal Latin sentence — “you love the fireman’s buckets”.  It is not clear, perhaps, which amas is which!  But even so, the meaning is unambiguous.

In short, translation does not have a special problem with ambiguity.  The author may be ambiguous; the language he writes in may assist or obstruct him; but surely the real cause of ambiguity is between the ears of the author, not in the mind of the translator?

Share

Bibliography (with links) of Pachomian literature

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Alin Suciu has collected a bibliography of publications of works connected with the 4th century founder of Egyptian monasticism, St. Pachomius.  He’s also linked to downloads.  You know, five years ago you just couldn’t have got these books!

The first on the list is a publication by Egyptologist E. Amelineau.  Amelineau is a name that I came across as a boy, when reading Leonard Cottrell’s books about ancient Egypt.  Flinders Petrie, who started scientific archaeology, found that Amelineau was the enemy, and his name was associated with everything bad in my early reading, therefore.

But the truth is that Amelineau wasn’t an archaeologist at all.  He was a coptologist, publishing papyri and other 4th century Christian texts.  His volumes — and they are numerous — are still of value today.  It is unfortunate, therefore, that in getting involved in digging for antiquities, in a period when this was commonplace, he outlived his time and started to do real damage. 

UPDATE: Dr Suciu has continued his Pachomian bibiography here with further excellent material. 

UPDATE: Part 3 is here, and part 4 and last here.

Share

An example of why abolishing AD and BC causes problems

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A report in the Daily Mail at the weekend highlighted a fresh stage in the step-by-step campaign by the establishment to replace AD and BC with the Jewish-originated CE and BCE. 

The BBC’s religious and ethics department says the changes are necessary to avoid offending non-Christians.

It states: ‘As the BBC is committed to impartiality it is appropriate that we use terms that do not offend or alienate non-Christians.

In line with modern practice, BCE/CE (Before Common Era/Common Era) are used as a religiously neutral alternative to BC/AD.’

The report has been attacked for being “untrue”, although the authenticity of the statement does not appear to be in dispute.  Nor is the creeping introduction of this novelty denied either — indeed it has been apparent to most of us for years.  The attacks, therefore, are merely an attempt to quiet media criticism.

But today I came across an example of how this nonsense is causing confusion.

In  Laina Farhat-Holzman, Strange Birds from Zoroaster’s Nest: An Overview of Revealed Religions, (2003), p.201, there is a summary of Mary Boyce’s discussion of Zoroastrian sources.  In this I read:

None of this [the Zoroastrian scripture] was committed to writing until the Avestan alphabet was designed for this purpose in the 5th century B.C.

Fortunately I had just been reading a useful book on modern research on Zoroastrianism, and this felt wrong.  And I found Mary Boyce, Textual Sources for the study of Zoroastrianism, University of Chicago Press (1990) p.1, which stated:

All their religious works were handed down orally: it was not until probably the fifth century A.C. that they were at last committed to writing, in the ‘Avestan’ alphabet, especially invented for the purpose.

Had Dr Boyce stuck to AD and BC, this error could hardly have arisen.  Thank you, University of Chicago Press, for causing an unnecessary confusion.

Share

British Museum catalogue now online and searchable (with pictures!)

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Another item I spotted via AWOL is that the British Museum (upon whom be blessings) has made its database of what it holds available on the web.  You can search it here, and an advanced search is here.

Welcome to the British Museum collection database online. Search almost two million objects from the entire Museum collection.  

1,974,761 objects are available
609,419 of these have one or more images

The database is updated weekly. The range of the Museum’s collection includes: …

  • …
  • Objects from ancient Egypt and Sudan, from the Neolithic period (around 10,000 BC) until the twelfth century AD
  • Objects from Ancient Greece and Rome (including Roman Britain), from the beginning of the Greek Bronze Age (about 3,200 BC) to the Roman emperor Constantine in the fourth century AD
  • …

    • Work is continuing on the parts of the collection that have not been catalogued and new entries are continuously being added.

    They’ve also implemented some kind of webservice, so you can access it programmatically.  I haven’t looked at the latter — too much like what I’m doing at work at the moment.

    I tried using the search, and entered ‘Mithras’.  I got back quite a lot of interesting items; but these were drowned in dozens and dozens of coin images.  Quite how the coins were relevant I did not see, and I can see that these will drown out all the other content.  Gentlemen: you need to implement an option to exclude coins!

    Another useful feature would be a permalink for each item, and also a way to embed the photos (because most of us would not want to copy them).  The link “use digital image” is very good, very comprehensive, and allows the museum to sell reproductions to libraries etc, without obstructing the ordinary man who wouldn’t buy one in a million years.  Well done, whoever thought of this.

    Here’s one interesting item, which I think we might say gives pretty much everything you’d want.  The date of the item is 200 AD.  I wish I had the CIMRM here, so I could identify it. 

    Bronze tablet dedicated to Sextus Pompeius Maximus, chief priest of the cult of Mithras and president of a guild of ferrymen; given by fellow priests of Mithras. Above the text are a bust of Mithras with a sacrificial knife and a patera.

    SEX ~POMPEIO~ SEX~FIL~
    MAXIMO~
    SACERDOTI~SOLIS~ IN
    VICTI~MT~PATRI~PATRUM
    QQ~ CORP ~TREIECT~TOGA
    TENSIUM~SACERDO
    TES~SOLIS~INVICTI~MT
    OB~AMOREM~ET~MERI
    TA~EIUS~SEMPER~HA
    BET

    Sexto Pompeio Sexti filio
    Maximo Sacerdoti Solis
    Invicti Mithrae Patri Patrum
    Quinquennali Corporis Treiectis Togatensium
    Sacerdotes Solis Invicti Mithrae
    Ob amorem et merita eius. Semper habet

    “Dedicated to Sextus Pompeius Maximus, son of Sextus, High Priest of the Sun God, Mithras, all powerful, and Father of Fathers, President of the Guild of Master Ferrymen. We, Priests of the all powerful Sun God, Mithras, do this on account of the high regard and affection we hold for him and his worthy deeds. He has this for ever.”

    Translating “invictus” as “all powerful” is interesting, isn’t it?  This chap was the high priest in his day.  Also note how the priests of Mithras do NOT call themselves “patres” but “sacerdotes”.

    The image is here, and I reproduce it below:

    Notice how Mithras is NOT depicted in a typical fashion, but rather face forwards with a radiate crown.  If you or I were devising such an image, we would have had a tauroctony, wouldn’t we?  Indeed without the inscription, would any of us recognise this as Mithras?  

    Possibly the workshop adapted an existing image type, of course.  But otherwise it is a salutary reminder that our assumptions on iconography can be widely mistaken.

    The other items are a bowl and a hatchet.  I wonder if these are part of the priest’s tools.  If so, we might ask what a priest of Mithras would use them for?  Do these suggest some form of sacrifices?

    Share

    Early CSCO volumes from the Coptic series online

    Posted on by Roger Pearse

    Via AWOL I learn that some of the early volumes of the Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium series are now online.  All of them are from the Scriptores Coptici sub-series.  The gentlemen responsible are the University of Chicago Oriental Institute.

    Admittedly the volumes seem rather dull — Saint’s Lives and martyrdoms.  But it is something to have them!  The texts were often published in pairs of volumes: ‘textus’ with the Coptic text, and ‘versio’ with a Latin translation.

    Well done the Oriental Institute.  More please!

    UPDATE: Alin Suciu has found some more!

    Much the most interesting of these is the Festal and Pastoral Letters of Athanasius in Coptic, as edited by Lefort.  Google translate is very good with French, so it should give some good results.  What I don’t quite know, however, is how these relate to other collections of such letters.

    Share

    JSTOR start to make content available to independent scholars

    Posted on by Roger Pearse

    An email has reached me this evening, drawing attention to a change of policy from JSTOR, announced yesterday.

    On September 6, 2011, we announced that we are making journal content in JSTOR published prior to 1923 in the United States and prior to 1870 elsewhere freely available to anyone, anywhere in the world.  This “Early Journal Content” includes discourse and scholarship in the arts and humanities, economics and politics, and in mathematics and other sciences.  It includes nearly 500,000 articles from more than 200 journals. This represents 6% of the content on JSTOR.

    While JSTOR currently provides access to scholarly content to people through a growing network of more than 7,000 institutions in 153 countries, we also know there are independent scholars and other people that we are still not reaching in this way.  Making the Early Journal Content freely available is a first step in a larger effort to provide more access options to the content on JSTOR for these individuals.  

    The Early Journal Content will be released on a rolling basis beginning today.

    Emphasis mine.  At the Oxford Patristics Conference, indeed, there was considerable unhappiness by those independent scholars I met about the lack of access to resources like JSTOR. 

    The FAQ’s give some more details.  The following questions explain what is happening, I think:

    Why did you decide to make this content freely available?
    Our mission involves expanding access to scholarly content as broadly as possible, in ways that are sustainable and consistent with the interests of our publishers who own the rights to the content.  We believe that making Early Journal Content freely available is another step in this process of providing access to knowledge to more people; that we are in a position both to continue preserving this content and making it available to the general public; and this is a set of content for which we are able to make this decision.

    Did you do this in reaction to the Swartz and Maxwell situations?
    Making the Early Journal Content freely available is something we have planned to do for some time.  It is not a direct reaction to the Swartz and Maxwell situation, but recent events did have an impact on our planning.  We considered carefully whether to accelerate or delay going ahead with our plans, largely out of concern that people might draw incorrect conclusions about our motivations. We also have taken into account that many people care deeply about these issues.  In the end, we decided to press ahead with our plans to make the Early Journal Content available, which we believe is in the best interest of the individuals we are trying to serve and our library and publisher partners.

    Yes, well, perhaps.

    For those who don’t recall, Gregory Maxwell uploaded 32Gb of JSTOR scientific articles, all published before 1923, to BitTorrent.  He did so as a protest against the obstruction of access to what were public domain materials, in reaction to the arrest of Aaron Swartz in July 2011 for downloading 5 million articles from JSTOR.  Maxwell’s action made JSTOR’s position impossible.

    I suspect that JSTOR was blamed for actions forced on it by the publishing industry, who ‘own’ the copyrights to this material, under the over-extensive copyright laws created by … the publishing industry.  And I suspect JSTOR and the publishers had a rather frank discussion.

    Perhaps I am over-imaginative, but I suspect that Maxwell gave JSTOR precisely the ammunition it needed to reason with the industry sharks.  “Now look what you made happen!” JSTOR could say, “Now someone has called the bluff.  Are you going to sue him, then?  For uploading out-of-copyright stuff?  For making state-funded scholarship available?  With the world’s journalists watching, and hostile?  Do you want the whole copyright law reviewed, with you plainly morally in the wrong, and perhaps legally in the wrong too?”  I imagine that, faced with that reality, the publishers decided to play safe.

    Reading the FAQ, it looks as if even then the European publishers — vermin in human form, many of them — tried to block it, confident of their total control of EU access.  Why else would we get the nonsense of journals only before 1870?  As ever, the non-US reader loses out.

    But it is to be welcomed.  JSTOR should indeed be addressing the problem of access by independent scholars.  There is, in truth, still no means for us to access JSTOR.  That is morally wrong.  But this announcement is a small step in the right direction.

    Thank you, JSTOR. 

    Share

    Materials from the Greek Ephraim

    Posted on by Roger Pearse

    Dominique Gonnet from the Sources Chretiennes has drawn my attention to a little known Greek Orthodox site, http://www.anastasis.org.uk/.  It is the property of an “Archmandrite Ephrem” and it contains English translations of all sorts of snippets.  In particular there are a  number of letters and sermons by Ephrem the Syrian, translated here.  I think few of these exist in English otherwise.

    There are no contact details on the site, and the last date I could find was 2008. 

    Share

    Academic publishers charging $30 for a PDF — but for how long?

    Posted on by Roger Pearse

    A deeply cheering article from George Monbiot at the Guardian.

    Academic publishers make Murdoch look like a socialist

    Academic publishers charge vast fees to access research paid for by us. Down with the knowledge monopoly racketeers

    …

    You might resent Murdoch’s paywall policy, in which he charges £1 for 24 hours of access to the Times and Sunday Times. But at least in that period you can read and download as many articles as you like. Reading a single article published by one of Elsevier’s journals will cost you $31.50. Springer charges €34.95, Wiley-Blackwell, $42. Read 10 and you pay 10 times. And the journals retain perpetual copyright. You want to read a letter printed in 1981? That’ll be $31.50.

    …

    Murdoch pays his journalists and editors, and his companies generate much of the content they use. But the academic publishers get their articles, their peer reviewing (vetting by other researchers) and even much of their editing for free. The material they publish was commissioned and funded not by them but by us, through government research grants and academic stipends. But to see it, we must pay again, and through the nose.

    The returns are astronomical: in the past financial year, for example, Elsevier’s operating profit margin was 36% (£724m on revenues of £2bn). They result from a stranglehold on the market. Elsevier, Springer and Wiley, who have bought up many of their competitors, now publish 42% of journal articles.

    …

    What we see here is pure rentier capitalism: monopolising a public resource then charging exorbitant fees to use it. Another term for it is economic parasitism. To obtain the knowledge for which we have already paid, we must surrender our feu to the lairds of learning.

    I endorse every word, every punctuation mark of this article.  Gaudeamus!  It is great to see this in the mainstream press. 

    This racket needs to stop.  Why should I work for pay in order to fund the profits of these people?

    Once they performed a useful service, and their charges related to it.  Now, in the age of the PDF, their costs are tiny and their greed insensate.

    Share

    Alice Whealey, SBL 2000 paper on the Testimonium Flavianum

    Posted on by Roger Pearse

    One of the most accessible resources on Josephus and the Testimonium Flavianum has always been a paper delivered in 2000 to the Society of Biblical Literature conference by Alice Whealey.  For years it sat at http://josephus.yorku.ca/pdf/whealey2000.pdf but this link is now dead.

    Rather than lose it — I needed to refer to it this evening and couldn’t find a copy! — I’ll place a copy on this site.  Where the SBL papers that used to be on the josephus.yorku.ca site now are I do not know.

    Share