Want to volunteer to translate an Encyclopédie article? See our call for participants.
Guidelines for Preparing Translations for the Collaborative Translation Project
Please read these guidelines before you begin your translation. We ask you to keep in mind that this project is collaborative and that every translator is an editor. You should take care to translate as accurately as you can, to retain the original formatting, and to render your translation in clear, correct, and modern English. To help you and to facilitate collaboration among translators, we have created an email list that includes all our volunteer translators: encyclopedie-translators@umich.edu. Please feel free to post queries that come up in the course of your labors. That is, if you have difficulty with a specific word, phrase, or sentence, feel free to post to the list and ask for help. This is, after all, a collaborative translation project, and we can and should help each other.
If your translation is improperly formatted, lacks clarity, or is incorrect or incomplete, we reserve the right to return it for further work before publishing it on our site. In some cases, we may even reject it entirely. If we do not receive your translation within a year of the initial assignment, we will contact you to see if you would like an extension or if you would prefer to have the assignment cancelled.
Label
The top of your page should have the following areas listed and filled in, aligned to the left side of the page:
Title:
French Title:
Author:
Volume and Page Reference:
Translator:
Translator Affiliation:
Translator Contact Info:
Publish Translator's Email: (fill in YES or NO)
Format
Generally, we'd prefer Microsoft Word format. If you are working in another program and you save your text in Rich Text Format, that will also work for us but we strongly encourage you to save and submit your work in Microsoft Word format if possible.
If you are translating multiple articles with the same name, please save each one individually. If, for example, you were translating “Man,” MAN (Jaucourt, Mythology) would be sent as one file and Man (no author, Geography) would be another.
Like the Encyclopédie itself, text should be single-spaced and paragraphs ought not be indented but separated from each other by an extra hard return, with no hard page breaks in the text.
Author
Please remove author names and codes (for example, D.J. or Jaucourt) from the translated text.
Title
Please put the title of your article in ENGLISH unless the French is generally understood or the translation is impossible/entirely infelicitous.
The first word in your document should be the title of the article as you have translated it. As in the original, only the first word of a multi-word title should be capitalized, unless it is a proper name. For example:
- Legal medicine
- Academy of Painting
When submitting the article, however, please put the title of the article in FRENCH for the subject line of your email. That will enable us to ensure that we link your article to the proper article in ARTFL.
Italics
Please retain italics as they are used in the article. For cross-references, the word “See” should be in italics, the article title should not.
Abbreviations and ampersands
Do not abbreviate to match abbreviations in the original unless in English the abbreviation is almost always used. Examples:
- Translate the French "&" as "and".
- Translate the French "Ste." or "St." as "Saint".
- Translate the French "Fig." as "Figure".
but translate the French "&c" as "etc.", not "et cetera".
Cross-references
Write cross-references as "See [article or plate name]". That is, only the word "See" should be in italics, and nothing should be in all caps. Be sure to translate the name of the article or plate referred to.
Please indicate the presence of a cross-reference by inserting a hyperlink in your word processor (preferably) or by changing the color of the text or underlining the word. If the cross-referenced article has already been translated, please use the same title that the translator of that article used and provide a URL for that translation already online.
Non-English book titles and quotations
No book titles cited in the articles should be translated. Abbreviated book titles should be expanded.
English translations should be provided for all quotations in languages other than French or English. The original (Latin, for example) should be retained in the text, with the translation provided either in brackets or, if the article is otherwise annotated, in a note.
Include non-English text in the Word document using a Unicode-compliant font. Do not use the Symbol font for Greek text or any other custom fonts for text in foreign languages.
Equations
If the article has equations in it, please recreate these using the Equation Editor within Word.
Small diagrams and images
If the article gives small diagrams or images (such as examples of typeface), create small images in JPEG format from the original pages and include these with your translation.
Instructions specific to translations of articles
Headword information: classification, part of speech, etc.
Please omit the part of speech and subject classification. For example, Père, s.m. (Droit naturel) becomes Father; Gens de Lettres (Philosophie & Littérat.) becomes Men of Letters.
We have standardized the subject classification translations and will fill any subject in for you, if applicable. Please note that the article title (Father; Men of Letters) is written out fully and only capitalized at the beginning of the word/words.
When the French original has a short explanatory phrase like “abstract term,” please translate it and leave it in.
After removing the part of speech and gender and translating any explanatory text like “abstract term,” there may be one or more categories of knowledge given. Normally these should not be left in the Word document. Occasionally what is given is not one or more categories of knowledge to which the headword applies, or a category and subcategory, but rather a whole hierarchy of knowledge from the very broadest word in the tree to the narrowest category of knowledge to which this headword applies. (Hierarchies usually begin with “Ordre Encycl. Entendement.” with variants on how "Encyclopedie" is abbreviated). If there is a hierarchy in your article, please include it in the article in its entirety. The category hierarchy should be in italics and separated from the headword with a comma, NOT within parentheses.
Instructions specific to translations of plate titles and captions
Titles of plates
All plate titles have been translated already, so no need to translate these. Instead, separate captions by plate numbers in square brackets, corresponding to their location in the ARTFL version.
Figure numbers
In the French original, the first caption is labeled "Fig. 1" and subsequent ones omit "Fig." but indent to show this. In the translation, write "Figure 1", "Figure 2", etc. at the beginning of each line.
Translator information
You may note that we are including name, institutional affiliation, and email address so that translators can be contacted. We will use the information that you supplied when you volunteered to sign your translation (name, institutional affiliation, email address). If any of these have changed, or if you do not want your email address published, please let us know when you submit your translation.
Submitting your translation
Please email your finished translations and an electronically "signed" copyright form to Sean Takats, at stakats@gmu.edu. He will go over your translation and make any minor changes that are required, do final processing, and send it to the Scholarly Publishing Office at the University of Michigan for publication on the site. If there are significant problems with the translation or its preparation either Sean or a member of the SPO team will contact you. Translations are generally published to the site in batches once a month.
If any of these instructions are unclear or you would like to volunteer for additional articles, please feel free to contact Dena Goodman at goodmand@umich.edu until September 2009. After that time, please contact Jennifer Popiel at popieljj@slu.edu.
