I was asked why I didnt use the Foundation translations instead of using Google's translation system. Its obvious that a lot of effort was used to create accurate translations. My response was this:
Thats easy. I live in a litiginous society. Ive already went through suits in court and its no fun. Monetarily and mentally. Also synchronization is the 2nd issue.
I once scanned 42 papers at the time Cristin Maheera was sued by the Urantia Foundation, for typing the entire Urantia book in. When they sued her, it went all the way to the Supreme Court.
At the time, I flew back to their headquarters and asked for permission. They told me to cease and desist and I did. Im not willing to face that kind of scrutiny.
At the time, I was the first person to automate the loose leaf publication of the maintenance manual on the Md11 aircraft at McDonald Douglas. So i had access to a $40,000 scanner. You can buy one now for less than 100.00.
The Urantia Foundation legally owns the translations and have paid for them, so they have the right, by law, to those translations and I would lose in court and it would cost me a lot more that 150.00 for each translation. Lawyers are costly and time consuming. Also I would have to redo all those translations again using the same technique I am currently using.
As a Urantian society, we went through a terrible breakup where the Brotherhood separated from the Foundation, it is now called the Fellowship. It caused a separation into different factions. It was an awful time where brother was pitted against brother. I am unwilling to place myself in a weak legal position. Id rather put up with accuracy issues and create something that can be used by different language speaking nations.
If there is a Hebrew translation, which I haven't checked, if there is, any user can read it from there, if they wish. Maybe, the Google translations i used, are good enough to create a spark where someone wants to listen to the book in 2 languages.
There is also the problem with human translations in that they aren't sentence to sentence, so i would need to meticulously go through the various translations to see if they synchronized, which the different human translations are not synchronized . This way, i am guaranteed sentence to sentence synchronization as I feed each language separately into the Google translator. That way, im guaranteed synchronization.
That was my second issue. I dont speak Swahili or Chinese. How could I guarantee that, if I used the Foundation's translation, even if they gave me permission, that the sentence that I separated out of a translation was the sentence that was the same that was being read in the other language.
The AI warned me that I would be out of synchronization and I would have no way of checking. I would have to hire translators that would read through the entire book to guarantee no mismatch. This way I am guaranteed synchronization at the expense of having, every so often, inaccurate translation issues.
Once again. The Google translator is good enough. The whole idea is to make it so that a person can listen to two languages to learn another language. And by reading the concepts of the revelation.
Im not that concerned with accuracy like the foundation is. I started this with the idea of relearning my French and it worked really well for that purpose.
Also, the Urantia Foundation is missing translations like Swahili, I believe. I'm not sure they did Swahili and I dont really care if they do as the problem of synchronization is a real issue.
There is 3rd issue. When the breakup of the movement occured, it amplified the difference between the philosophy of getting the book to more people and the opposite of keeping of the copyright and the keeping of the book inviolate.
The Foundation worried that they would lose the ability to keep the book in its original form. They worried about inaccuracies forming. They spent a large sum of the reader donations on fighting Maheera in court.
The Foundation lost the copyright as the Supreme Court came to the conclusion that the book's authors were not Foundation authors and could not own the copyright. Which brings me back to ownership of translations. The Foundation owns their translated texts. And with the knowledge that someone in the Foundation could, for whatever reason, decide that they dont like me using their translations. I could be the brunt of the same thing that caused the original breakup of the movement into several factions.
Pierre
Show quoted text
No comments:
Post a Comment