User talk:Uchohan

Hello, Uchohan, welcome to Wikisource! Thanks for your interest in the project; we hope you'll enjoy the community and your work here.

Please take a glance at our help pages (especially Adding texts and Wikisource's style guide). Most questions and discussions about the community are in the Scriptorium.

The Community Portal lists tasks you can help with if you wish. If you have any questions, feel free to contact me on my talk page. John Vandenberg 07:31, 3 January 2008 (UTC)

The Holy Qur'an

Regarding the changes you are making, our edition is intended to have been authored by w:Abdullah Yusuf Ali and it should match the "Y" lines in Project Gutenberg. As a result, I have restored this change, because the previous text was accurate:

Y: Prohibited to you (For marriage) are:- Your mothers, daughters,
sisters; father's sisters, Mother's sisters; brother's daughters,
sister's daughters; foster-mothers (Who gave you suck), foster-sisters;
your wives' mothers; your step-daughters under your guardianship, born
of your wives to whom ye have gone in,- no prohibition if ye have not
gone in;- (Those who have been) wives of your sons proceeding from your
loins; and two sisters in wedlock at one and the same time, except for
what is past; for Allah is Oft-Forgiving, Most Merciful;-

While your change is an improvement to our copy, we must keep to the original edition by Abdullah Yusuf Ali. If you find anything that is very badly translated, you can add an annotation to the text.

Also, there is no reason for us to only have a single translation of the Koran, so if you know of a better translation that is in the public domain, or you would like to start a project to build a "modern" translation, please suggest it at Scriptorium. John Vandenberg 08:04, 3 January 2008 (UTC)

This change is very sensible, but I have checked the Gutenberg file and it says "Perish in you rage". I will not restore the Gutenberg text, as I am starting to believe that the Gutenberg text has not been properly proof-read. John Vandenberg 08:12, 3 January 2008 (UTC)

Please stop changing the spelling of words in the Qur'an. Spellings like "realise" are perfectly correct, and should be respected when that was used by the translator. Eclecticology 03:16, 8 January 2008 (UTC)

I've been wondering about that as well, as I was patrolling some pages that you had edited. I'd feel more comfortable if I were sure that you're just correcting obvious typos. If the original author or translator used a particular spelling, though, I'd leave it alone. Cheers. Cowardly Lion 04:08, 8 January 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for your reply. When it's absolutely clear that we are dealing with a typo or an OCR problem it's perfectly good to make the change. Something like "evil- doer" tends to come up when the hyphen is at the end of a printed line, and our software tries to wrap the text. "Practice/practise" tends to be used differently in different countries. For me the "c" is for the noun, and the "s" is for the verb, but here the author's style should prevail. My first impression was that capitalising first letters would be correct, but perhaps in the alternative the full stop should be a semi-colon or comma. In one that I saw you capitalised "And", but some would say that a sentence should not start with a conjunction. In some cases it needs checking with the original. PG texts still let OCR errors through even though they say they've been proofread. Hope I'm more of a help than a hassle. Eclecticology 05:35, 8 January 2008 (UTC)

I understand your position, though I understand that some Muslims would consider any interpretation of The Prophet's words into any other language to be a form of blasphemy. Any translation implies a change, but non-Muslims could not be easily convinced to learn Arabic just to read the Qur'an. Eclecticology 01:20, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

I suggest being very minimalistic in your efforts to clean up this text, as this etext is of poor quality to begin with, and there isn't much you can do to improve that. There are many good quality editions which may be used instead, such as Sacred Books of the East Vol. 6 & 9, which are a very scholarly edition, even if it is a bit dated. John Vandenberg 05:10, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

Excellent, an Urdu speaker!

Hey, I've been hoping to find an Urdu speaker for a while. I wonder if you'd mind taking a few minutes to create small articles for w:Omar Khadr and w:Ahmed Said Khadr on the Urdu wikipedia? You don't have to translate the whole English article - but just having the basic details, even just a paragraph or two, would be very much appreciated. Since they spent much of their time in Pakistan, it seems likely that it is a Wikipedia language which would be well-served by having articles :) Sherurcij ^{Collaboration of the Week: John Gould} 01:27, 23 April 2008 (UTC)