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)

TDP — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 16:40:55 -0700

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)

Kevin Lin — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 05:47:55 -0700

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)

VP — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 02:15:21 -0700

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)

alex — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 23:17:37 -0700

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)

Qiaochu Yuan — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 22:31:57 -0700

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)

Andy Putman — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 21:55:49 -0700

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)

Harry Gindi — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 21:51:40 -0700

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)

Kevin Lin — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 21:41:17 -0700

Is this question acceptable? Please discuss here.