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Is this question acceptable?: Drinfeld’s 1988 letter to Schechtman: translation request

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    • CommentAuthorKevin Lin
    • CommentTimeJun 27th 2010 edited
     

    Is this question acceptable? Please discuss here.

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    I like the idea, but I'm not so sure that MO is the right place for it.

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    We had a question earlier asking for a translation of an interview with Kato. I'm not sure if we ever got the translation. However, I thought that was a good question, and I recall the meta discussion being mostly positive.

    I thus think it's a good question. However, I'm not sure about the current format (ie an empty community wiki message inviting people to translate various bits and add them).
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    I remember someone suggesting in the past that the way to do this kind of thing is to post a machine translation as a CW answer and have people edit it from there.

    • CommentAuthoralex
    • CommentTimeJun 27th 2010
     
    If this is OK:

    http://tea.mathoverflow.net/discussion/407/transcription-of-an-interview/

    then I really don't see how this question is anything less than OK.
    • CommentAuthorVP
    • CommentTimeJun 28th 2010
     

    It's better to be cautious. Has the letter been publicly released? Even though it was privately circulating among Russian mathematicians, posting a translation entails some ethical issues.

    • CommentAuthorKevin Lin
    • CommentTimeJun 28th 2010
     

    My initial thought was just that a collaborative translation might lead to the post being constantly bumped over a couple days, which might be a minor nuisance.

    • CommentAuthorTDP
    • CommentTimeJun 28th 2010 edited
     
    I'm afraid I failed to obtain permission to distribute the translation of the letter publicly, so I will be deleting the question by midnight tonight unless there is massive opposition. The failure of the question to generate a translation should perhaps teach us that a skilled individual translator, in this case, K. Conrad, is much more efficient than the collective of MO.

    To address Qiaochu's suggestion: I extracted the text with tesseract, then pushed it through google-translate, but the result was rubbish, so it seemed easier to start with a blank answer.

    Update: Actually, deletion is now impossible, so I will just add a note of explanation to the question.

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