The British-Dutch mega-publisher Reed Elsevier spent more than 3 million dollars in bribes lobbying fees in the US last year. What the publisher hopes to get back for this money? It probably won’t be a more balanced and more honest form of copyright. The US politicians that were bolstered by this “support” have been bullying … Read More
Last week I posted a book to Project Gutenberg that I had talked about earlier (“Haddockisms“): Ontboezemingen by Gabriël, Carel van Nievelt’s pseudonym. Van Nievelt was a writer of fantasy and travel stories. Oddly enough he does appear from time to time in translated collections, but he has almost been forgotten in the Netherlands. Only … Read More
(Due to untranslatableness of some words, rest of this entry be in Dutch.) Om de een of andere reden associeer ik creatieve, kindvriendelijke scheldwoorden zo zeer met Hergé’s Kapitein Haddock, dat toen ik dergelijke scheldwoorden tegenkwam in een boek uit 1869, de bijzonderheid daarvan me niet eens opviel. Tegenwoordig kun je iedereen een koektrommel of … Read More
A couple of lessons I learned from my distributed translation experiment: 1. Don’t worry about volunteers showing up. Initially nobody seemed to be interested in participating, but after a while somewhere from ten to twenty people turned up, which was more than enough for my purposes. I had advertised my experiment in four places: this … Read More
“Buffer States are just anvil States.” H.G. Wells in his essay “Holland’s Future”, in Current History, A Monthly Magazine: The European War, March 1915.
About a month a go I promised I would blog a bit about the difference between the major Dutch projects for public domain e-books. I’m talking about: books in electronic format with the copyrights expired in Dutch available for free over the internet in a format that allows mix, rip and burn. That’s a pretty … Read More
Summary: two years ago, I asked people on the internet to help me create a public domain translation of a public domain source text, Poe’s The Tell-tale Heart. The goal was to help establish whether it was possible for a disparate group of translators to create a literary translation. You will find both a description … Read More
Joep’s wonderlijke avonturen When I first read Herman Heijermans’ “Joeps wonderlijke avonturen” (Jack’s Wondrous Adventures) I was pleasantly surprised for two reasons. The first was that it was by far not as bad as I had expected based on what little I knew from Heijermans, third hand knowledge I had about his play “Op hoop … Read More
Here’s a scene from Heijermans’ Diamantstad (Diamond City). It’s winter and Eli has promised his family food. Having exhausted all possibilities of getting a job for the day, he decides to go and catch fish. On his way to the Amstel river he meets a kid he knows, who asks him what he’s up to. … Read More
Aletta Jacobs (1854 – 1929) was the first Dutch woman to complete a university education. She had to jump through a number of hoops to get where she got. First she had to get permission to attend classes at a polytechnic. Next she had to get the state’s permission to attend med-school lectures at the … Read More