Contents of this page:

Logging In
Requesting Entries
Adler numbers
Finding out which entries have already been claimed
Submitting your request
Entering your translation
Footnotes, bibliography and links
Using the automated linking system
Submitting your translation
Modfying your translation
Deadlines
Copyright issues

Your audience
Including Greek
Betacode
Transliteration
References and citations
Formatting

WHO MAY BE A TRANSLATOR? Anyone who is competent at translating ancient Greek is welcome to contribute to the Suda On-Line project. "Competent" is a vague adjective, and we do not associate it with any particular level of experience or achievement. In general, however, the sort of ability we require is rare among those who have not studied ancient Greek for several years, and had at least some post-undergraduate training in the language. Nevertheless, if you feel that you are proficient in ancient Greek, chances are that you are competent enough for our purposes, regardless of your credentials. If you are unsure or hesitant, feel free to contact one of the managing editors, who will probably suggest that you submit a trial translation to our test database.

WHAT IF YOU DON'T HAVE A COPY OF THE SUDA IN GREEK? You can still be a translator. An electronic version of the Greek text will be available for you on the web (without apparatus critici, however).

HOW DO YOU SIGN UP AS A TRANSLATOR? Visit our web site:

http://www.stoa.org/sol/

Follow the link labelled "Register as translator". You will be transported to a page similar to this:

You will be asked to choose a login name and a password. What you enter here is totally up to you. If your name is John Smith, you might make your login name "smith" or "jsmith" or "Torquemada." You will need to use your login name and password each time you visit the S.O.L. site to enter or modify your translations, so you should choose words that are distinctive and easy for you to remember. Make sure that "Translator" appears in the option box at the bottom of the page. Your request will be forwarded to the managing editors, who will either approve your request or write to you asking for more information. When your registration has been accepted, you will receive a note of confirmation.

After you become a registered translator, all subsequent actions you take will begin with the same process. You will need to enter your login name and password in the spaces provided on the S.O.L. home page:

Which will take you to the translator option page. If you encounter any difficulty logging in, or if you forget your login name and/or password, contact the managing editors.
 

When you log in as a translator, the following options will be presented to you:

The three options "Translate entries", "Modify…" and "Request Translation entry" are explained below. Notice that beside each of them are radio buttons for "Test Database" and "Real Database". You are welcome to play around with the Test Database. It’s a good way for you to get used to the system without any serious consequences. When you get ready to enter something for real, however, MAKE SURE THE "REAL DATABASE" BUTTON IS SELECTED.

REQUESTING ENTRIES

The first thing you need to do is to figure out what you want to translate. There are basically two ways that translations are being allocated:

• By block: contiguous series of entries are assigned to individual translators (e.g., the first thirty entries for the letter Delta). We offer this option for those who don’t have a strong preference about what they translate -- it helps us get large chunks of the lexicon done and ensures that the more obscure and mundane entries are covered in addition to the longer and more exciting ones. Although a lot of the entries in any given block are bound to be pedestrian, many of our translators have found unexpectedly fascinating entries within the blocks they’ve been assigned.
• Entry-by-entry: translators ask to be assigned entries, ideally ones that pertain to areas they have some interest and expertise in. If you aren’t aware of any entries that pertain to your areas of interest, try checking the indices locorum of the important publications in your field.

ADLER NUMBERS:  Once you have decided on the entries you are going to translate, there is one more thing you need to know: the Adler reference numbers for your entries. The standard edition of the Suda followed by S.O.L. is Adler’s Teubner edition. The S.O.L. database is programmed to recognize the reference number assigned to it in that edition. Adler reference numbers consist of the name of a Greek letter and an Arabic number; for instance: Alpha 3419 Is the Adler number for the entry on Apollonius of Rhodes.

If an entry you are interested in has already been claimed, feel free to submit a request for it anyway. We will record your request and keep it on file in case the person who has been assigned the entry cannot complete the assignment for any reason. If an entry you are interested in has already been translated, please consider signing up as an editor, and employing your expertise at vetting and improving the existing entry. [Note: currently (10/30/99) computer glitches are preventing some entries from showing up on the lists of claimed and translated entries; we anticipate that this problem will be corrected soon, and apologize for any inconvenience in the meantime.]

When you have selected your entries, the next step is to enter your request, which you do by clicking the "Request translation entry" button on the Translators’ Options page. This will take you to the following page:

Here you can enter the Adler numbers of your entries. This form will send a text message to the managing editors, so you can also include other information, questions and requests. The managing editors will verify the availability of the entries you request as quickly as possible (usually within a day or two) and send you a note of confirmation when the entries have been assigned to you.

ENTERING YOUR TRANSLATION:

Once you have received confirmation of your assignment, log in to the S.O.L. site again and click on the "Translate Entries" option. This will take you to a page showing you which entries you are signed up for and which you have already translated:

Enter the Adler number of the entry you want to translate. This will get you to a page similar to the following:

As you see from this example, you are given the transliterated headword or phrase for your entry and the Greek text from Adler’s edition, which you have the option of viewing either in transliteration, in betacode, or in a number of popular Greek fonts (as here). To view the text in a Greek font you must have the font installed on your computer. For advice on downloading and viewing Greek fonts on the web, visit the following page from the Perseus project: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/Help/fonthelp.html.

Immediately following is the form where you enter your translation:

1. Enter a translation of the headword(s), if translatable, in the box provided. If the headword is not translatable (e.g. if it is a proper name or an untranslatable exclamation) enter a transliteration in the box following the transliteration scheme given below. If there are noteworthy alternative translations or transliterations, include them after the first one, separating each alternative with a comma. The more (reasonable) alternatives you include in this box the easier it will be for people searching the database to find your entry.

2. Make sure that the appropriate button is selected, identifying the headword as an anthroponym (personal name), toponym (place name) or other (everything else). This will also aid in searching and in categorizing the contents of the database

3. Enter the translation itself into the large box provided. Pay attention to the formatting advice given above the box, particularly in regard to double-spacing (i.e. hitting the "enter" or "return" key twice) between paragraphs, and to the formatting of footnote numbers. The easiest and safest way to enter your translation is to write it all out using a word processing program, then copy and paste the text into this box.

More detailed instructions on formatting and style can be found in the Content and Style section below.

NOTES, BIBLIOGRPHY and LINKS:

The translation entry page also includes boxes in which you can enter notes, bibliography and associated internet addresses:

You are encouraged to enter additional information in these boxes but you are not required to do so.

The footnotes should offer clarification of muddy references, explanations of citations or allusions made in the text, references to ancient texts that are parallel to, derived from or sources of what’s in the Suda (this sort of thing can frequently be gleaned from Adler’s apparatus or that of another text).  Your footnotes should also point out information that is clearly or arguably wrong. References to easily obtainable reference works such as the OCD, Smythe, etc. would also be helpful, as would citations of modern scholarship on issues with which your entry deals.  For bibliographical references in notes, the preferred format is the MLA format for parenthetical in-text citations. Be sure to use the same method of numbering the footnotes that you use in the translation itself (i.e. [1], [2], [3] … etc.). You may make a general comment on the entry by writing it at the top of the footnote box without a number. DOUBLE-SPACE between footnotes, as you did between paragraphs in the translation.

You should place all full bibliographical references in the "Additional Bibliography" section (the name of this section will soon be changed simply to "Bibliography". The preferred bibliographical format is the MLA "works cited" format. You should include in this section the full bibliographical information that you cite in abbreviated form in the notes. You may also include references to scholarship that is more general or tangential than what you put in your notes. Do not put ancient works in the bibliography section; refer to them instead in your footnotes. DOUBLE-SPACE between bibliographical entries

We have recently installed a quick and easy way to include Web links in your Suda entry. If you choose to include links, be sure that in your notes you explain the destination of the link. Below the "Notes" section you will find a system by which you can automatically generate links to a number of useful Web resources. Currently the system is set up to provide links to the following sites: Perseus, Bryn Mawr Classical Review, the "Stoa Waypoints" index of GPS data, the on-line Princeton Encyclopedia of Classical Sites and an electronic edition of the Bible. More sites will be added later.

For each link you want to generate, select the Web database in the left-hand box. The pull-down menu in the center allows you to choose particular sub-sections of the site in question (for instance, for Perseus you can choose to limit your links to LSJ entries or to entries in their electronic version of the Princeton Encyclopedia of Classical Sites. Enter the term you want to search for (e.g. a name, a site, or a textual citation) in the text field on the right-hand side of the page. It may take some trial and error to generate working links to the site you want, since you generally have to use the same transliteration and/or citation format that the target site does for the system to work properly. After you have submitted your translation, please be sure to check out each link you have generated by clicking on it and verifying that it takes you to an appropriate Web site. If it doesn't, go back and modify what you put in the text field or remove the link by clearing the text field and selecting "none" in the site selection menu.

Links that you cannot generate using the automated system should be put into the field labelled"Associated Web Addresses." Be sure to give the complete URL, including the "http://" part.  If you have a web browser that lets you view two windows at the same time, an easy and almost foolproof way to do this is to open another window, call up the page you want to refer to in that window, copy the URL bodily from your browser's address box, then return to the SOL entry page and paste the URL there.  DOUBLE—SPACE between items in this section, just as you did for footnotes.  If you click HERE you will go to a site designed by our own Ross Scaife to make it easy to find internet resources of all sorts, and clicking HERE will take you to the Argos ancient/medieval search engine , in case you want to cast your net even wider.

The last thing you need to do is to select the subject area(s) to which your entry pertains using the list that occurs at the bottom of your entry page: