OT: French translations

gwern0 at gmail.com · 05 Aug 2009, 06:12 · from 2009-August.txt.gz

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From: gwern0 at gmail.com (gwern0 at gmail.com)
Date: Wed, 5 Aug 2009 02:12:06 -0400 (EST)
Subject: (urth) OT: French translations
Message-ID: <fxznw5xqze58m4d51oUYAxe124vaj_firegpg at mail.gmail.com>

Hi everyone. This is a rather off-topic request, but bear with me. I'm desultorily learning myself some French this summer, and I've decided that since I'm only really interested in reading French (and not so much in speaking or writing it), that the best thing to do would be to simply translate some large French work into English and learn as I go*.

But when I tried with one text, I discovered my motivation was zero - as it was already translated. So I need something which hasn't been translated before; unfortunately, all the texts I know worth translating are the ones which *have* been translated!

Since Urth.netters seem to know everyone and everything worth knowing in literature, here's my challenge: what reasonably short, reasonably basic yet untranslated French text is there which I could translate? Bonus points if it's in the public domain, and triple bonus points if it's also Gene-Wolfe-related.

* I'm also developing a little program along the lines of http://jtauber.com/blog/2008/02/10/a_new_kind_of_graded_reader/ but I can currently only test it on English texts; being able to work through a French text and see how it performs would let me tweak it.

-- 
gwern
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