I read the website before the book existed. Actually, I argued that it should be turned into a book, because books in general have higher status than websites. Then I read the book, and translated it to Slovak language.
My opinion on reading the comments is… they are interesting, but the added value per minute spent is significantly lower than reading the book. (Some of the comments are awesome, but most are not, and there is a lot of them.) Thus, if you have anything useful to do, reading the comments after you have read the book is probably a waste of time. (Perhaps, if you have specific questions or objections to specific chapters, you should only read the comments in those chapters.)
Your time would probably be better spent reading high-karma articles which are not part of the book (is there a way to see the highest-karma articles? if not, look here), and… you know, going outside and actually doing things.
Inspiring what you have achieved. I was thinking if I should embark too and translate it in my native language (Romanian) but maybe it may be a waste of time since the language is basically a hybrid and it has many logical fallacies ( double negatives are allowed for some reason). Maybe I could ask this: did you translated them one by one? (Or is google translate good enough for some essays since it is a long book) How much time did you spend? Are you going to publish (if legally possible) it so you make it more popular in your country?
Unfortunately, my translation didn’t have any visible impact. My friends warned me that “it will be useless, because the kind of people who would be serious about rationality, they already speak English and read English texts online”. I didn’t listen to them, because I thought that even if this is true for most people, there are exceptions (such as people who suck at languages, or very young people) that make this work meaningful. But now… I have to admit they were probably right. As far as I know, there about five people in entire Slovakia interested in rationality, and they have already read the Sequences in English.
The translation is freely downloadable from my website, and I don’t believe there is a market for selling it. I didn’t do it for money (I already have a nice income as a software developer), but in a hope of increasing the local sanity waterline.
Google Translate cannot translate sentences into Slovak well. But I used it for translating individual words—much faster than looking them up in paper dictionary. I think I am pretty good at (passive) English, and translating is my hobby. In the past, I have localized a few open-source games, and translated a few interesting articles. With LW, I also started with translating a few articles… and then at some moment I realized I already had about 20% of the book translated, so suddenly translating the entire thing felt doable. It took me more than a year. I am usually very low on conscientiousness, so this was one of two most serious projects in my life (the other one being localization of Battle for Wesnoth). Too bad this turned out to be so useless.
So, I’d say… unless you enjoy translating as an activity, don’t do it. If you decide to do it anyway, translate a few articles first, put them online, share them on Facebook, and see the reaction. Unfortunately, even among people who will give you positive feedback, most of them enjoy “insight porn”, not rationality per se.
Hmm, this does make me think that at the very least we should have a section on the R:A-Z page that lists translations into available languages. Though, I guess you are unlikely to find it if you don’t already speak english? Though maybe that’s fine because we expect it to spread via word-of-mouth anyways, and you only need one person in a social network to be good enough at english to discover it.
Russian translations of both the sequences and HPMOR seem to have had a pretty reasonable impact, given the size of the russian community, so I don’t think all translations have been useless, though it seems quite plausible that you need to meet a certain threshold of potentially interested people before it turns out to be useful.
I would like to know, among active Russian rationalists, how many of them speak fluently English; and among those who read the Sequences, how many read the original vs how many read the translation. (My guess would be “above 75%” for both.)
I read the website before the book existed. Actually, I argued that it should be turned into a book, because books in general have higher status than websites. Then I read the book, and translated it to Slovak language.
My opinion on reading the comments is… they are interesting, but the added value per minute spent is significantly lower than reading the book. (Some of the comments are awesome, but most are not, and there is a lot of them.) Thus, if you have anything useful to do, reading the comments after you have read the book is probably a waste of time. (Perhaps, if you have specific questions or objections to specific chapters, you should only read the comments in those chapters.)
Your time would probably be better spent reading high-karma articles which are not part of the book (is there a way to see the highest-karma articles? if not, look here), and… you know, going outside and actually doing things.
You can go to the all posts page and then change the setting to ‘top’ to see most upvoted posts
Inspiring what you have achieved. I was thinking if I should embark too and translate it in my native language (Romanian) but maybe it may be a waste of time since the language is basically a hybrid and it has many logical fallacies ( double negatives are allowed for some reason). Maybe I could ask this: did you translated them one by one? (Or is google translate good enough for some essays since it is a long book) How much time did you spend? Are you going to publish (if legally possible) it so you make it more popular in your country?
Unfortunately, my translation didn’t have any visible impact. My friends warned me that “it will be useless, because the kind of people who would be serious about rationality, they already speak English and read English texts online”. I didn’t listen to them, because I thought that even if this is true for most people, there are exceptions (such as people who suck at languages, or very young people) that make this work meaningful. But now… I have to admit they were probably right. As far as I know, there about five people in entire Slovakia interested in rationality, and they have already read the Sequences in English.
The translation is freely downloadable from my website, and I don’t believe there is a market for selling it. I didn’t do it for money (I already have a nice income as a software developer), but in a hope of increasing the local sanity waterline.
Google Translate cannot translate sentences into Slovak well. But I used it for translating individual words—much faster than looking them up in paper dictionary. I think I am pretty good at (passive) English, and translating is my hobby. In the past, I have localized a few open-source games, and translated a few interesting articles. With LW, I also started with translating a few articles… and then at some moment I realized I already had about 20% of the book translated, so suddenly translating the entire thing felt doable. It took me more than a year. I am usually very low on conscientiousness, so this was one of two most serious projects in my life (the other one being localization of Battle for Wesnoth). Too bad this turned out to be so useless.
So, I’d say… unless you enjoy translating as an activity, don’t do it. If you decide to do it anyway, translate a few articles first, put them online, share them on Facebook, and see the reaction. Unfortunately, even among people who will give you positive feedback, most of them enjoy “insight porn”, not rationality per se.
Hmm, this does make me think that at the very least we should have a section on the R:A-Z page that lists translations into available languages. Though, I guess you are unlikely to find it if you don’t already speak english? Though maybe that’s fine because we expect it to spread via word-of-mouth anyways, and you only need one person in a social network to be good enough at english to discover it.
Russian translations of both the sequences and HPMOR seem to have had a pretty reasonable impact, given the size of the russian community, so I don’t think all translations have been useless, though it seems quite plausible that you need to meet a certain threshold of potentially interested people before it turns out to be useful.
I would like to know, among active Russian rationalists, how many of them speak fluently English; and among those who read the Sequences, how many read the original vs how many read the translation. (My guess would be “above 75%” for both.)