Author talk:Richard Hakluyt

Document by Hakluyt in English and Kildin Sami

One page of Hakluyt's 1589 book includes the very first known written document representing a Sami language. The metalanguage of the book page is English, though. Here is an image of this bilingual document in Commons [1].

I'm new in Wikisource and don't understand it well enough yet, neither conceptually or technically. Here I'm trying to create an article for this bookpage, which I want to link to other documents in Kildin Sami. But at the end it should also be linked to English Wikisource, right? Could someone please help me getting this started in the proper way. --Rießler (talk) 08:37, 26 February 2023 (UTC)

Hi there. I'm not an expert either but normal practice is to upload and transcribe complete works, not individual pages. I have had a look to see if I can find a scanned copy of the 1589 edition but the only one that comes up is a very poor PDF of a 1980's microfilm of it on Internet Archive (and a couple of other sites). The book is also large (>800 pages), is in a mixture of normal type and black letter, and includes significant chunks in Latin. Taken together, these would make its transcription a hard row to hoe.

There is a much better scan of the 1599/1600 edition already uploaded to Wikisource (see Index:University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (IA principalnavigat1and2hakl).pdf).

If your only interest is the one page, it might be better to create a section on the 'Sámi languages' Wikipedia page consisting of the image of that one page, with your transcription alongside it. Regards, Chrisguise (talk) 16:54, 27 February 2023 (UTC)

Thank you! There are four pages which I will transcribe, only one of them includes the Sami words. I will later link this page to the Multilingual Wikisource. --Rießler (talk) 08:32, 28 February 2023 (UTC)

@Chrisguise – I transcribed Page:University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (IA principalnavigat1and2hakl).pdf/325 as a test. I'll check the content one more time, but could you please guide me with the page formatting. How exact does it have to follow the original and where do I find hints and examples for the relevant markup. --Rießler (talk) 13:33, 1 March 2023 (UTC)

Sorry for the tardiness of my reply. There is some basic guidance at [2].

The following is my opinion only - I'm sure others will have different views.

I try to strike a balance between transcription (correctly capturing the text as printed) and reproduction {making the layout and type look exactly the same). When transcribing, always aim to copy the text as it is, warts and all, and avoiding the temptation to improve it by correcting misprints, old spellings, etc. In terms of reproduction, I tend to do this mostly for title pages of works, and tables of contents, or for the layout of the text in poetry. Tabulated information / mathematical formulae / music needs to be formatted properly too.

The one thing I won't do is replicate the long 's' in older works. It's an 's'.

In reality it boils down to how much time you want to spend doing this. Producing a reproduction takes longer than just doing the transcription, and there will be times when you won't be able to reproduce what is printed (e.g. old fonts, old ligatures in Greek text, etc.). The other thing is your level of programming skill with HTML. I have none, so am completely reliant on templates to do formatting. Those who do have knowledge of HTML can do more interesting things.

It's also useful to have a look at existing works to see what others do. If you go too far astray, someone will usually set you straight. Regards, Chrisguise (talk) 01:56, 6 March 2023 (UTC)