I would like to introduce MBT to some relatives and friends of mine. Sadly, they cannot read English. I think it would be a shame if they missed on such a great and enriching read for this reason. I've done a few quick forum searches on this topic, but could not find anything relevant.

So my question is: are there any plans to translate MBT into other languages? If not, I thought we could start a community-based translation project and see how far we can take it on our spare time. I would like to help out with the french translation.

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I hear, and I forget. I see, and I remember. I do, and I understand.

Now how did I know you were going to offer up the French version, Froggy? ;)
Love
Bette

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All That Is
what is?
Consciousness.

good idea, it'd be helpful even if it was just online pdf version.

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"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society."
www.martinpeniak.com

Well, the only explanation is that you must know my swedish is quite poor! ;)

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I hear, and I forget. I see, and I remember. I do, and I understand.

So you did pick your name after Froggy the Gremlin from the old children's show with Smilin Ed McConnell and then Andy Devine: "Plunk your magic twanger, Froggy!" I used to love those adventure movie shorts about Gunga the Elephant Boy. Wasn't his elephant named Teelah? I liked even better the short where the mute Mexican peasant boy was given the ability to sing, although he still could not talk, by the Old Man of the Forest because he saved the woodcutter's donkey from being beaten and abused. That was back even before The Howdy Doody Show with Buffalo Bob Smith. I didn't like this show as well as the earlier, but Princess Summerfall Winterspring was hot with no comparison on Andy's Gang.

Ted

Hehe, that's quite a jump to conclusion you did here Ted, albeit an interesting one ;) I simply picked this nickname due to my french roots and you all know how much we love them frogs!

So it seems there's no such effort being planned in the short/medium term which means I'll probably get started on this this summer when my spare time allows for it, and hopefully I will have the stamina and motivation to keep it up.

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I hear, and I forget. I see, and I remember. I do, and I understand.

Froggy,

I'm glad you enjoyed my trivia, a little non-quantum weirdness, from the past out of my childhood. There are translation arrangements within Google as I understand, but perhaps too limited to be useful and I don't know what quality of translation they result in. If you seriously wish to consider this undertaking, I suggest that you evaluate the quality of translation they produce as you could presumably transfer a page by page searchable English version into the Google function and copy back out a French version of that page. Then the effort would be reduced somewhat to a matter of correcting literal translations into actual translations of the thoughts where literalness is inadequate.

I will bring this thread to Tom's attention and get his thoughts on the project. I am sure that Tom is in favor of the dissemination of the information, but as copyrighted material, it would be good to have his blessing and cooperation on the project and to perform it according to his standards and the legalities of international copyright law.

Ted

I would not use online translators: their problem is more than a problem with grammar and a lot of what's translated ends up in such a way that the original meaning is lost completely and turned into something else, either nonsensical or with a different meaning. And that's with normal books about usual topics. With MBT the translation process has to be even more carefully done, because it's very easy to bias the result with one's personal beliefs and interpretations. In short, the more the familiarity with Tom's theory, the more accurate the translation can be. My guess is that using a translating engine, even if the result is corrected and all that, would tend to disseminate a different meaning than Tom intended.

That said, the trilogy is quite huge and translating it is no easy task. I have tried this myself and all I was able to do was to translate around 20 pages into Spanish, from Book I. Even after having been very careful to do it properly, the result is not as good as I would have liked and I would still have to use more appropriate words and expressions, otherwise it sounds awkward in Spanish, too literal maybe.

I would like to have done this but I am afraid that all on my own would be beyond my possibilities. If we were talking about a few chapters, it would be more feasible. What you could do is choose the most relevant chapter to disseminate in Spanish, I could do that I think.

I was thinking that, given how relatively huge the three books are and how fragmented and incomplete the information would be translating just one or more chapters, a very good idea for the time being could be to translate the original 8-page MBT or something like that. So that we can have some meaningful material in non English languages. As far as Spanish is concerned, information about either MBT or Thomas Campbell is totally non-existent.

Perhaps what is needed is someone or ones that are fluid in the target language and English to understand MBT well enough to write a book, right?

As I understand it the eight page proto-MBT was how it was started, and it was added on to by Tom sending it out, him getting feedback, and then him answering the feedback inquiries. MBT the original eight page thing exists in book three, per what I think I know.
Love
Bette

_________________
All That Is
what is?
Consciousness.

To All,

I am not familiar with the results of the translating engines available. Are they really so bad that they cannot even serve as the basis to start from without having to do it word for word by an individual? What I was suggesting was that Froggy evaluate the quality of the translation they can produce and how much additional work would be required to produce something true to the original. Otherwise you do it the long hard way or wait until it can be done by a paid project. The problem then will be to find someone familiar with the meaning of the original that can do the real translation. You can't just use someone fluently bilingual. They have to be fluent in MBT as well as the two languages. And surely you have noticed that developing that understanding is not a trivial and quickly acquired capability.

Ted

That's what I meant to say Ted, fluent in English, the target language, and the MBT model.
Love
Bette

_________________
All That Is
what is?
Consciousness.

Ted,

I am not a professional translator, but I have often gone through the process of translating excerpts from books so that friends could read them. I think that translators - such as google's - tend to translate expressions too literally, not taking into account their real meaning, and much less the context. My belief at this moment is that, in order for the final product to be loyal to the original, there are no shortcuts and that a human mind is necessary, reading the original sentence by sentence, and putting it into the output language, paying attention to what the writer meant and, as a final step, taking care that the translated expressions don't sound too "robotic" (sometimes they do if you do it too literally), so that readers don't get the feel that it sounds like a language other than their own.

I might try to translate (into Spanish) some relevant chapter or, as a mid-term goal, I could even give it a try with book I, but I am aware that more than a couple of pages a day would be really difficult for me at the moment. Is the bilingual thing an issue? I cannot tell for sure. If my English doesn't look too awkward and you don't have the impression that it sounds like it's not my mother tongue, then it might not be. If my English is reasonably correct, my Spanish will not be a problem, since it is my first language and thus I can write Spanish way more easily.

Though I haven't succeeded at understanding MBT at the being level yet, I have a reasonably good grasp of MBT concepts (after reading both the books and most of Tom's posts here) at the intellectual level. Thus, it would be a matter of putting what I intellectually understood from MBT into my own mother tongue.

As I said, I could give it a try, but I would need someone to verify that what I have translated is reasonably loyal to what Tom intended to convey. I need some kind of feedback in order to know whether I can do it reasonably well.

Claudio knows Spanish.
Love
Bette

_________________
All That Is
what is?
Consciousness.

Si, señoras y señores. I already thought that it would be great to have a shorter version of MBT in Spanish. So many people in Spanish speaking countries don't know about it.

Claudio

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"Experience is the ultimate teacher."

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