[lg policy] In One Classics Department, Translation by the 'Crowd'

[Harold Schiffman]

In One Classics Department, Translation by the 'Crowd'
5 Minutes With Marie-Claire Beaulieu, Whose Students Translated a
Medieval Manuscript 1

Courtesy the Miscellany at Tisch Library

By Ryan Brown

Two years ago, an archivist at Tufts University was sifting through
manuscripts in the library's special collections when he came across a
lone, unlabeled folder. To his surprise, it contained a stack of
documents that no one then at the library had ever seen, some of them
dating back to the 12th century. The Tisch Library Miscellany
Collection was born. Now, Marie-Claire A. Beaulieu, an assistant
professor of classics, has a novel way of identifying the documents
and translating them from Latin to English—she's having her students
do it. The 15 undergraduates and graduates she enlisted became
historical sleuths, opening the cold case of the centuries-old texts;
their work has been published online in the project's digital archive.

Q. Do you have any idea where these documents came from?

A. They seem to have been collected together for education purposes,
maybe by a professor for a class. But they've gone completely
unnoticed in the library for at least 50 years. We can't find any
record of a class using these manuscripts at Tufts or of a donor
giving them to the library. It's quite mysterious.

Q. Were there any highlights among the discoveries your students made?

A. We had one 12th-century manuscript in the collection, and no one
who had looked at it knew what it was. Some of the edges were cut and
words were missing. But my students were able to fill in the text and
figure out that the manuscript contained excerpts from the Bible and a
copy of part of a sermon by Pope Leo the Great. That's a real
discovery, and it's exactly the type of research students can and
should be doing. The library actually tweeted about that manuscript
and people responded to say how extraordinary they thought the find
was.

Q. Do you think such "crowd" translation, in which the participants
aren't experts but just students interested in the subject, is the
future in your field?

A. Definitely. With the humanities becoming so digitized, we're
working with larger and larger collections. Someone doesn't need to be
an absolute expert on a manuscript to translate it. If you give an
undergraduate the proper tools, they can do a fantastic job. This is
something my colleagues in the sciences have realized for a very long
time. Undergraduates frequently work in labs on major projects. So,
absolutely, I think in the humanities that is the future as well.

Q. How do you persuade your students that studying the classics is
important in the 21st century?

A. The short answer is that the [classics hold] the roots of our
culture and civilization. I tell my students all the time, We feel
like we've arrived at this summit of learning and that we know the
truth now. But the truth changes constantly, and it's important to see
that it often looked very different in the eyes of our predecessors.

Q. Will you do a translation project with students like this again in
the future?

A. Yes. We have to finish translating the rest of the collection, and
then we are looking into acquiring other materials so we can make this
a regular course offering.

http://chronicle.com/article/5-Minutes-With-Marie-Claire/128032/

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 Harold F. Schiffman

Professor Emeritus of
 Dravidian Linguistics and Culture
Dept. of South Asia Studies
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305

Phone:  (215) 898-7475
Fax:  (215) 573-2138

Email:  haroldfs at gmail.com
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/

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