Please check the Files page for links.
These are works in progress, but you can at least begin reading a very flawed version in english right now.
Small Update
I have uploaded the raw and edited photos and added a link to the Files page. I am currently working on the OCR quality control phase of the project. I will update as soon as I have anything new to add.
What is the Zapffe Project?
Simply: to translate Peter Wessel Zapffe’s supposed masterpiece Om det tragiske from norsk into engelsk. Having read The Last Messiah and been enchanted by it, having scoured the internet to read more of his writings, having seen the fallen soldiers around previous translation projects, and having seen the strong desire people have to read this book, I figure that if I want to read it, and I do, I will have to translate it myself. There are rumors and hearsay surrounding these attempts; mainly that the person who translated The Last Messiah was attempting to translate Om det tragiske but eventually fell silent, deleted their blog, and disappeared. Murdered perhaps?
There are several others on reddit who ‘decided to make this translation their life’s work’ and then immediately were discouraged by commenters. There are also at least two other people I have heard rumor of translating this book. I would love to collaborate or contribute in any way to this project; I don’t care about the glory. I just want to read the damn book.
If you have any helpful information or want to chat about this project, please contact me.
The Plan:
I don’t speak or read norwegian. I’m beginning to teach myself. But it’s already seeming both extremely difficult and somehow easy at the same time. From some reddit threads, I’ve gathered that Zapffe wrote sometimes in riksmål, an obsolete written dano-norwegian orthographic peculiarity, that supposedly was part of some orthographic langwars in Norway around the 1930’s that basically meant people used to use danish spellings for norwegian words, back when Denmark was big daddy to Norway. I’m not quite sure. Wikipedia holes only go so deep. To the extent that this will hinder me, we’ll see.
I’ve already ordered and received my copy of the text from Norway. Complete!
Phase 1: Take a photo of every single page of the book. Complete. (I have done it twice now. The first set of photos was a learning opportunity and no amount of editing could clean them up thoroughly enough.)
Phase 2: Batch edit every photo to increase contrast and rotate, et cetera. Clean up these pics as best as I can. Currently in progress! Will be done this evening, most likely. Complete! Will post the raw photo files and the cleaned up photo files soon, once I figure out a reliable hosting situation. The files are quite large.
Phase 3: Combine all photos into one pdf document, making sure to order the pages correctly. This is tedious, but not difficult. Complete! The OCR software (ABBYY) does this with ease.
Phase 4A: Run these images thru OCR software. Complete!
Phase 4B: The OCR software has a 98% accuracy rate(supposedly). Which means that at least, there will be roughly 6 thousand words it scanned incorrectly. Currently, this is way more tedious than I imagined it would be. The Norwegian dictionary included with ABBYY finereader is running into many problems with the riksmål/danish spellings. Nutshell: Per Page, there are about 10-20 mis-OCR’d characters and then there are probably 20-30 words I have to add to the user dictionary. Theoretically, as I add words to the dictionary, it will flag fewer and fewer words throughout the book. It’s taking roughly 10-15 minutes per page, which feels unacceptable.
[The software has confidence levels for each character and flags characters with low confidence to be manually confirmed; I’ve happened to glance at a few words that weren’t flagged but were incorrect anyway. This has me worried, but I figure that I’ve got to live with these issues and move on. I am hoping to catch them in the more rigorous phases of translation.]
Phase 5: Once a Norwegian text is PDF’d and of the highest quality I can manage reasonably, the translation will begin. I will run it thru Google translate and I will sit with the book, the google translation, and go word by word, while also improving my Norwegian at the same time. I have a couple dictionaries to reference and will probably buy a couple more. If anyone speaks norsk and wants to contribute, please contact me. If this pisses someone off somewhere at the University of Oslo(I think they own the copyright) and they make their own translation, even better! A single page, according to the internet, has roughly 500 words, and also according to the internet, a competent translator can easily do 1500 to 5000 words a day. I am not competent, but the book is 571 pages long. If I translate 3 pages a day, a reasonably small amount, I can finish the translation in 190 days, just under 7 months. With the help of Google translate, I think this is attainable. If I translate 15 pages a day, it would take me just over a month to finish. I’m not an optimist so we’ll see how it goes once the translation begins.
Phase 6: Once the translation is complete and I’m happy with it, I will lay it out in InDesign and create printable and readable PDF versions and distribute it online freely. I will probably also make my own physical copies and probably give a few away/sell it at cost to some friends, depending on how much it costs me to produce physical copies. I’m still weighing out if I should sell some to the few Zapffe devotees out there. I could probably be convinced. Contact me! If you’re the University of Oslo or Pax publishing house, and you want me to stop this project, you’ll have to make an english translation available worldwide, at which point I will happily cease.
Notes:
Do what you want with the files; but if you do end up using them in any way, I’d love to know and/or contribute so please contact me. Translation feedback and help is more than welcome. Producing a readable version is my main goal, though I am aiming for beauty and quality as well.