Today we launched the new wiki platform which will provide the technical basis for our cooperative translation project, and I am pleased to announce that we already have our first contribution to the translations project.

Christopher Scott has translated the entirety of chapter 5 from book 9 of Vettius Valens’ Anthology, which is so far as I am aware the first time that this chapter has been translated into English and published anywhere.

The translation is available on our wiki.

This is part of a larger effort that we are undertaking in order to form a cooperative translation project in order to translate the entire corpus of Hellenistic astrological texts.  The idea is that we will be able to use the wiki in order to allow multiple translators to work on the same texts, while at the same time cross referencing them and providing additional linguistic information for each of the words used in the texts.   Ultimately it is a quasi-open source translation project since we will make all of the translated texts available to the public online for free, although we are still working out some of the details surrounding multiple author copyrights and eventually we may publish the texts in book form.

We would like to thank Mark Kuenzel for helping us with the CSS code for creating the two column pages in the wiki. This will allow us to display both the original Greek text and the English translation side by side, thus allowing for greater cooperation between editors and helping us to continually improve translations in the future.

While this is a huge milestone for our project, there is still much work to be done.  The Hellenistic Astrology Wiki is now officially open and we are looking for more contributors.  If you are interested in joining us in our efforts to recover the Hellenistic tradition then please let us know!  For contact information please see the contact page on our site.