Opinions Solicited

[Richley Crapo]

I will be publishing an English translation of a sixteenth century Aztec history (relatively) soon and I have a major decision to make about the way I present the Nahuatl text. My original intent was to present the Nahuatl text in the two-colum (Nahuatl-English) format with the original spelling and punctuation, so that these features of the original manuscript would be available for study (for such purposes as identifying provenance and related things). Somewhere along the line, I let myself be convinced by a reviewer that regularizing the spelling to a modern orthography would make the text more useful to a broader range of students, and I did that. Now, I'm having second thoughts, particularly since the most recent reviewer has reiterated my original thinking and strongly recommended restoring the original spelling and punctuation. Since this was my original intent, I'd lean towards following that advice, but since Nahuatl research is *not* my primary area of expertise, I'd really like to hear what those of you who work in the area believe to be the better approach: a straight transcription of the original text or a modernized orthography for the Nahuatl column?

Richley Crapo