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Yeah :-/ I know, that's why I'm asking if this can be reconsidered. As a non-English native speaker, I think it's a shame. Rather than read the English translat

Yeah :-/ I know, that's why I'm asking if this can be reconsidered. As a non-English native speaker, I think it's a shame. Rather than read the English translation of Les Misérables, I'd rather read the original French text, and having Standard Ebooks as a source for non-English books means I can: 1. Discover / browse / search. 2. Expect high quality text & typography. 3. Be part of a high-volume community that archives and refines texts year after year. "Then build your own similar site with high-quality titles in French!" , I hear some say. Sure, but I see tons of excellent marketing & infrastructure already done by Standard Ebooks, which could be reused for non-English books! Said differently, mid/long term I see the greater good being achieved by supporting non-English titles in Standard Ebooks itself, not in one satellite mimic site per language, of varying maintenance quality. To compare with the domain of online encyclopedias, these are the same reasons to have en.wikipedia.org and fr.wikipedia.org maintained under one (Wikipedia) umbrella sharing infrastructure, not wikipedia.org and frenchwikipedia.org maintained by entirely different teams.

richardjs 6y ago
It looks like the subject has come up a couple times on the mailing list [1] [2], but in my (admittedly casual) searching I didn't find anything since 2017, with the most relevant answer being "not at the moment". Since it has been a couple years, maybe it's worth bringing up again on the mailing list? [1] https://groups.google.com/u/1/g/standardebooks/c/JdVpCm3ckGg/discussion https://groups.google.com/u/1/g/standardebooks/c/JdVpCm3ckGg... [2] https://groups.google.com/g/standardebooks/c/osOEfs5HdLo/m/2SPCxiUVCQAJ https://groups.google.com/g/standardebooks/c/osOEfs5HdLo/m/2...
- ronjouch 6y ago
  Thanks for the ML digging :) . Agreed, it's worth bringing up again on the mailing list; will do this week and post here a link to my message.
derbOac 6y ago
I was thinking that one of the problems with a lot of public domain translations is that the translations are extremely dated. So you're reading this text that you almost need a translation of that itself is a dated translation. This isn't the fault of Standard Ebooks, but it's an elephant in the room of public domain texts in general. In many ways I'd rather see effort put into crowdsourced or volunteer modern translation than into improved copyediting. It's especially problematic if you consider that the original text in the foreign language isn't available as well, as you're noting.

richardjs 6y ago

It looks like the subject has come up a couple times on the mailing list [1] [2], but in my (admittedly casual) searching I didn't find anything since 2017, with the most relevant answer being "not at the moment". Since it has been a couple years, maybe it's worth bringing up again on the mailing list? [1] https://groups.google.com/u/1/g/standardebooks/c/JdVpCm3ckGg/discussion https://groups.google.com/u/1/g/standardebooks/c/JdVpCm3ckGg... [2] https://groups.google.com/g/standardebooks/c/osOEfs5HdLo/m/2SPCxiUVCQAJ https://groups.google.com/g/standardebooks/c/osOEfs5HdLo/m/2...

ronjouch 6y ago
Thanks for the ML digging :) . Agreed, it's worth bringing up again on the mailing list; will do this week and post here a link to my message.

derbOac 6y ago

I was thinking that one of the problems with a lot of public domain translations is that the translations are extremely dated. So you're reading this text that you almost need a translation of that itself is a dated translation. This isn't the fault of Standard Ebooks, but it's an elephant in the room of public domain texts in general. In many ways I'd rather see effort put into crowdsourced or volunteer modern translation than into improved copyediting. It's especially problematic if you consider that the original text in the foreign language isn't available as well, as you're noting.