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I was just reminded of an idea I had some time ago. This post might be too discussion-y, so please feel free to close it.

Many schools require their grad students to pass some sort of language exam. In math, often this comes in the guise of having to translate a page of French, German, or Russian into English. This is a pretty large number of man-hours which is not put to use! Every year, hundreds of hours of translating, and hundreds of hours of grading the translations, vanish into thin air! In lieu of a language exam, how about translating a few pages of, say, EGA or SGA (or any other important work which needs an English translation)? We'd have a reasonable translation fairly quickly (within a few years if many schools participate?). It would be easy to set up an EGA translation wiki. The result wouldn't be perfect, but it would definitely be usable. Translating EGA is not like translating poetry --- or maybe it is ;-)

The main questions are probably administrative. Would math departments be amenable to this idea? Alternatively, it could be just a voluntary thing. It could be like: hey, you're studying for the language exam anyway, so why don't you translate a couple pages of EGA as practice for the language exam? Or it could something be like: after the language exam is over, please type up your translation on the EGA translation wiki.

What do you all think? Would this work?

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I think it's a great idea, though can immediately see a few drawbacks, but I think that the way you have phrased it is unsuitable for MO. I don't see any way for an answer to this not to lead to a discussion and that doesn't work here. Sorry, I'm voting to close. Try a nearby blog and see if they'll take your idea! – Andrew Stacey Dec 17 at 12:39
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 Translating something which is 'important' probably requires a non-trivial amount of understanding of its subject matter. On the other side, translating a long technical work required, at the very least, self-consistency. Both requirements are rather hard to accomplish by an army of random graduate students of various backgrounds, various motivations and various other varying aspects, I'd say. – Mariano Suárez-Alvarez Dec 17 at 12:40
This really isn't an appropriate question for mathoverflow. I agree that it deserves discussion, though. I'm going to start a post on this over at SBSeminar. – David Speyer Dec 17 at 12:44
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 Voting to close because Kevin is and because my trigger finger's been itchy since I hit 3000 ;) – Harrison Brown Dec 17 at 13:00
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 Post is up: sbseminar.wordpress.com/2009/12/17/… – David Speyer Dec 17 at 13:44
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closed as subjective and argumentative by Andrew Stacey, David Speyer, Kevin Lin, Harrison Brown, Ben Webster♦ Dec 17 at 14:45

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