tangential to transliteration

[Chris Cosner]

Given that most scholarly presses are not as well equipped as Middlebury
to provide proofreading of texts in Cyrillic, and there still exists a
plethora of Cyrillic encodings, using only Cyrillic remains problematic
for most of us. Author submissions often need to be rekeyed by typesetters
who do not read Russian, and a last-minute (even well-intentioned) font
substitution by a typesetter can ruin an extract right before it goes to
the printer (after proofs have been checked!) This is because the
typesetter and the printer may be using slightly different encodings of
the same font, and the printer may request that their version of the font
be used. The typesetter sees no difference between b and v or soft sign
and b, and voila...'looks right to me.'

For the most part, it is easier to verify that transliterated text will be
dealt with correctly by the printer.

Advice? When publishing a book that contains Cyrillic with a university
press in the USA, namely one that, unlike Middlebury, does not
specialize in things Russian, request that you be able to check
not only final proofs, but 'blues' as well. Blues are the final
preprint stage. If it is correct in blues, it will be correct in the
published version. However, keep in mind that publishers have a very
narrow time frame with blues and may have trouble accomodating you. Also,
they will not correct your errors at the blues stage--only printer errors.

--Chris Cosner

On Tue, 28 Sep 1999, Beyer, Tom wrote:

>  For the past two years I have required authors in my Middlebury Russian
> Series to replace transliteration with the actual Russian text. It looks
> better, computers make it simple and I suspect the reding or deciphering of
> transliteraiton will becme a lost art very quickly
>
> Tom Beyer
> Middlebury College
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Richard Robin
> To: SEELANGS at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
> Sent: 9/27/99 5:32 PM
> Subject: Re: SEEJ Transliteration Preference
>
> Burying the "scholarly" system - for Russian anyway - is long overdue.
> Puskin -
> with or without the hachek - looks pretentious at best.
>
> -RR
>
> "Stephen L. Baehr" wrote:
>
> > After a year at the helm of SEEJ, I have noticed that our compositors
> make
> > far more mistakes with the "international scholarly" (=hachek)
> > transliteration system than with the modified LC system. As SEEJ moves
> > towards more computerization, the problems will probably get even
> worse,
> > since one computer's hacheks may well be another computer's blobs.
> >
>
> --
> Richard Robin - http://gwis2.circ.gwu.edu/~rrobin
> German and Slavic Dept.
> The George Washington University
> WASHINGTON, DC 20052
> Can read HTML mail.
> ????? ??-?????? ? ????? ?????????.
> Chitayu po-russki v lyuboi kodirovke.
>

___________________________________
Chris Cosner
Assistant Professor of Russian
DePauw University
315 East College
Greencastle, IN  46135
office: (765) 658-4749
home: (765) 653-2876
ccosner at depauw.edu