Style: punctuation and inline translations

[acabal]

I've been going through the first few endnotes, and I wanted to get your opinion on an issue of style.

It looks like you're putting translations of Greek/Hebrew/etc. inline with the footnote. That's great. However I noticed that they're inline with the original text, with no punctuation inbetween. This seems a bit abrupt. How about putting punctuation after the foreign text, and then wrapping translations in parenthesis, to offset them visually from the footnote and to give the sense of an editorial interruption?

For example, endnote 3 looks like:

3. Formula quædam constituenda est: quam si sequemur in comparatione rerum, ab officio nunquam recedemus “There ought to be some rule established: which if we follow in comparing things with each other, we shall never fall short of our duty” (Cicero, De Officiis).

We could tweak it to look like this:

3. Formula quædam constituenda est: quam si sequemur in comparatione rerum, ab officio nunquam recedemus. (“There ought to be some rule established: which if we follow in comparing things with each other, we shall never fall short of our duty.”) Cicero, De Officiis.

We added a period after the original line, a period after the translated line, wrapped the translation in parens to offset it visually, and removed parens from the reference, since the pattern of "quote followed by a name followed by a book title" already means "reference" to the reader.

This might require some massaging because it looks like Wollaston likes to cram a bunch of quotes into one note. But I think it would be a positive stylistic tweak. Personally I'm only a few endnotes in and I'm feeling like the unpunctuated segues into translations are very noticeable.

[acabal]

It's be quite a bit of work to do this but I can help if needed

[davgross]

I was following the lead of the edition I copied the notes from, which ran the translations right up against the quotes like that. I wasn't too happy with it either. But I think switching to the way you recommend may just shift the legibility problem around: not having the source in parentheses leaves it hanging onto the sentence awkwardly and makes it hard to tell what it is.

We might try fitting the translation and source in the parentheses and separating them by an em-dash or something like that, too.

Part of the problem is that the formatting of the endnotes isn't consistent, so whichever "standard" you try to fix on, you'll find plenty of reasons why you have to make exceptions for it.

But I invite you to experiment a bit and see if you can make it more readable.

[acabal]

I wouldn't worry too much about messing with Wollaston's style in terms of endnotes, it already seems quite difficult, inconsistent, and dated. Modernizing it and adding consistency for clarity's sake would be a good endeavor and I doubt anyone would complain.

What we could do for multiple quotes in one endnote is set each one on its own paragraph, then offset the sources with an em dash. This is the method used in Ben Franklin's autobiography which I just finished today and that style is quite readable, probably much more readable than just cramming a bunch of quotes into one line. For example note 3 in that file: https://github.com/standardebooks/benjamin-franklin_the-autobiography-of-benjamin-franklin/blob/master/src/epub/text/endnotes.xhtml#L19

I've often struggled with the idea of "lightly modernizing" vs "100% faithful transcription" with other books, but the bottom line is 1) one of our goals is to use smart, informed, and light editorial tweaks to make things easier for modern readers; and 2) for 99% of these works (maybe not this specific one though) a faithful transcription is already available elsewhere, like Gutenberg, if the reader is a stickler.

If you're not against it then I'll dig in here and see what I can do.

[acabal]

What I decided to do is generally keep the style as it is, but introduce most translations with a colon, and punctuate them to offset them from the reference. I'm going to see how that reads and if it reads OK I'll apply it to the whole thing.

This book is going to take me a lot longer than I thought, it's extremely dense. I'm impressed though by the work you put in to the endnotes, there's a lot of solid semantic detail in there. Well done!