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gitenberg-dev / gitberg

A command-line tool for interacting with books in git
https://www.gitenberg.org/
GNU General Public License v3.0
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how to support old book in modern language, maybe regionalized #158

Closed soloturn closed 1 month ago

soloturn commented 2 years ago

what is the best way to support regional or modern language for old books? to give an example, in german. the english version of tom sawyer has a very good translation into german from 1908 - which uses old german spelling, sometimes old words. kids reading the book do get the content, but not the spelling and wording for their next german exam. there is a newer translation by h. hellwag, lower quality, no pictures, partially more modern german, but sometimes a little distorted.

how could one ideally "branch" off from a book and publish it? e.g. an austrian german or swiss german version, with modern spelling? the changes are slim, 1900 one would write "thun", in 2020 one would write "tun". in switzerland one would write "Velo", while in Germany one would write "Fahrrad". i tried to modernize the 64417s german here: https://github.com/soloturn/Tom-Sawyers-Abenteuer-und-Streiche_64417/commits/master.

eshellman commented 2 years ago

Standard Ebooks does language modernization of English Language public domain books; Project Gutenberg tend to be very conservative about this.

As both of your translation sources are in the public domain, you are free to publish your version however you like. It is quite difficult to get such work onto Amazon however, so don't expect to make money from it. Versioning and branching of public domain books is not a solved problem at all.