Ask HN: Important works that haven't been translated into English | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Important works that haven't been translated into English

3 pointsmjfl5 comments

Lots of people have lots of important ideas all across the world, but not everyone speaks English. Therefore many, or perhaps most, of the important 'works', philosophical or otherwise, have no English translation.

Hacker News is a significant global discussion board, where people who speak all kinds of languages congregate to discuss tech. This could be a great opportunity to collect a list of books together for translation into a language we can all understand.

Thus I am wondering, for those whose native language is not English, what really important books do you know that have no English translation?

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There are a great deal of math articles/books in Latin, French, and Russian that have no English translations at this point.

For example, Euler wrote 800 articles (in Latin and French) and only 207 have been translated into English.

- http://eulerarchive.maa.org/enestrom.php?topic=trans (link 404s once in a while, so worth refreshing a bit later if it doesn't work)

Examples of works in the French language:

- http://www.numdam.org/

Examples of scans of Math articles that may or may not be in English:

- https://dmitripavlov.org/scans/

A French example from that archive of scanned math articles

- https://dmitripavlov.org/scans/guichardet.pdf

Discussed with many responses on Reddit r/books and r/writing, to give just a couple of examples.

Who can say what counts as important. That doesn't describe a quality of a book, but rather a cultural or personal judgment, and a measure of relevance over time.

From trying to research Jewish folklore, I can tell you there are a ton of books and archival materials (eg at YIVO) that have never been translated from Hebrew or Yiddish (or, occasionally, Ladino and other Jewish languages).

I'm asking for specific 'Great Books' and yet no one gives me specifics.

For tech books, most old books have been superseded by modern versions. The original may be interesting for a history of science point of view, to understand how each idea got slowly refined to get to the current state, but the modern books have a destilled version of the old results.

IIRC the original Einsten paper about relativity doens't use Minkowski spaces, but all modern explanaions use it because it makes everything more clear.

About books it's more difficult. It's interesting to read the discussion by Hofstadter about the translation of "Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid" The book is full of subtle details that can be overlocked or broken in the translation.

I guess translating Borges from Spanish is very difficult too. IIRC someone bought the rights and made horrible translation to ¿German? and they are waiting to make new translations.

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