Translation talk:Shulchan Aruch

I am looking over the project so far and it seems a bit sparse. In particular, Yoreh Deah, which would be a major contribution since there are no current translations, is empty. I had a thought. Often times there are efforts to make siyums on various works in memory/honor of an individual. It is common to ask people to participate in such efforts by learning for a few hours some selected work. What if we attempted this and asked people to translate a siman of Yoreh Deah? Imagine asking 200 people to each do 2 simanim. I think that you could have the entire book translated in a matter of weeks or at least a significant chunk of it? I have been thinking about organizing such an effort. The major problem is that while I can expect the participants to provide translations, I don't think they will be very good at careful formatting of the text according to the guidelines. What would be needed is a small group willing to make the formatting changes once the major English text is in place. Are people interested in this idea?

Mark Dredze 17:58, 14 November 2005 (UTC)

The article says: "The Hebrew text is online here. The goal of this Wikisource text project is to copy that Hebrew text here (it is in the public domain),"

The link is broken. Can we copy the text from another location? Reuvenk 14:51, 19 March 2006 (UTC)

I have found a new link and amended the intoduction page to point to it. This text is also in the Lubavitch Library so I assume if the previous link was public domain this one is too. It looks like the same text. --Samscribe 09:37, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

Is the text from the Lubavitch library a good text? --Samscribe 09:37, 15 May 2006 (UTC)
 * I don't see any text there, only a blank page. It looks as if they removed all other Jewish texts and left there only texts written by their own Rabbis. Nevuchadnezzar 06:00, 26 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Update: An old edition is available in DjVu format at the National Jewish University Library. However, the DjVu plugin isn't working in my browsers. --Nevuchadnezzar 07:08, 26 October 2006 (UTC)
 * The only problem with the one at HUJI is that it's not very readable, and you can't cut and paste. A more "normalized" copy, rather than a scan of a specific historic edition would actually be better. Anyone know of any others online? --Bachrach44 16:42, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

The link is not to the shulchan aruch but rather to a compendium called Shulchan Arukh HaRAv written by Rav Shneur Zalman of Lyadi, the first Lubavitcher Rebbe. It basically follows the Shulchan Aruch of Rav Yosef Caro but contains Rav Shneur Zalman's commentary. It is the basis of practice for Lubavitcher Chasidim. See this link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shulchan_Aruch_HaRav

This is the link at Wikisource: http://he.wikisource.org/wiki/שולחן_ערוך Although it is not complete, it contains MANY simanim not yet started in this project

Translation vs. Transliteration-Standards Proposal
So there seems to be no standard as to which terms in Hebrew (and Aramaic) get translated into English and which ones only get transliterated. When specifying a standard, there are obviously the competing concerns of


 * 1) Will a reader [without a solid Jewish education] know what is referred to by the transliterated term (for instance, a casual reader may be lost by the term piggul or even mutar even though in yeshiva/kollel one would not bother to translate it)
 * 2) Does translating rather than transliterating result in a serious loss of meaning; the strongest example would be Torah, but words like tefillin (a casual reader will probably not have heard of phylacteries either) would also appply.

I would propose that a word be left transliterated only if the transliterated version can be found in, say, the Merriam-Webster online dictionary.

DemocraticLuntz (talk) 19:01, 15 May 2012 (UTC)