austraLasia #1766

A collaborative 'first'. Pat yourself on the back!

ITALY-INDIA-USA-AUSTRALIA...20th February 2007 --  We cannot be sure where all the contributors came from, but at least from the nations named here.  It is possible to claim a little 'first', I think, in that as the result of collaborative work using the Boscowiki 'translation' invitation, a number of people worked on a dozen 'collects' which have not appeared before in any formal printed version, and some indeed have not appeared before in English. The exercise took little more than a week.
    Fr Mike Mendl, from New Rochelle, was the first to put up a tentative effort to adjust some earlier versions of collects for recently beatified members of the Salesian Family. His aim was to present them in good, flowing contemporary English where they begged for this, and to translate several that were not in English at all (both the original Latin and the Italian of these was available on sdb.org). Then Fr Chris Woerz from the other side of the US saw them and decided to work at presenting these in a respectable and attractive layout, adding in material on the life of each individual - and a photo.  In the meantime, confreres from around the English-speaking world hopped in and offered some careful suggestions - a comma here, a new line there, an altered phrase there again and so forth. Mike then took all these from the wiki and brought it all together. I've converted them to pdf and put them on Bosconet.
    The final result, a Word file, amounted to 9 mb which was far too much for anyone to be able to download, especially if on a poor line.  Open Office Writer's default capacity to save as pdf brings them down to a little over 2 mb.  Still difficult for some to download, but most will manage.  The 'Salesian Collects' package (remembering these are just a handful of them to do with recent 'Beati') can be found on Bosconet under the What's New section beneath recent news items (home page).
    What the effort does prove, of course, is that we now have the collaborative tools and some willingness around not just EAO but other parts of the English-speaking world to achieve small tasks like this.         
    Within a week or two I hope to be able to announce a much more daring but potentially satisfying venture which will call for collaborative effort across all the main languages of our region - it will require the translation of phrases (perhaps about two dozen, no more) and one or two paragraphs - maybe no more than one hour's work for someone in Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese, Tetum, Bahasa, Korean, Thai - at least those. Should readers of Hindi and Kanada  be interested, they could also be part of it. Should you be interested in helping, you may flag that interest even at this early stage.
    In the meantime - pat yourselves on the back!
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