tea.mathoverflow.net - Discussion Feed (Drinfeld’s 1988 letter to Schechtman: translation request)

TDP comments on "Drinfeld’s 1988 letter to Schechtman: translation request" (6496)

2010-06-28T16:40:55-07:00

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.

Kevin Lin comments on "Drinfeld’s 1988 letter to Schechtman: translation request" (6483)

2010-06-28T05:47:55-07:00

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.

VP comments on "Drinfeld’s 1988 letter to Schechtman: translation request" (6482)

2010-06-28T02:15:21-07:00

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.

alex comments on "Drinfeld’s 1988 letter to Schechtman: translation request" (6479)

2010-06-27T23:17:37-07:00

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.

Qiaochu Yuan comments on "Drinfeld’s 1988 letter to Schechtman: translation request" (6478)

2010-06-27T22:31:57-07:00

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.

Andy Putman comments on "Drinfeld’s 1988 letter to Schechtman: translation request" (6477)

2010-06-27T21:55:49-07:00

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).

Harry Gindi comments on "Drinfeld’s 1988 letter to Schechtman: translation request" (6476)

2010-06-27T21:51:40-07:00

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

Kevin Lin comments on "Drinfeld’s 1988 letter to Schechtman: translation request" (6475)

2010-06-27T21:41:17-07:00

Is this question acceptable? Please discuss here.