I was recently reading an English translation of a non-theory-related non-fiction book that was published just a few years ago. Next on my list was re-reading Engels’ “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific”.
I can only describe my experience as the most severe whiplash; comparable only to reading the comments on a news thread on .world after checking the Lemmygrad thread.
I found myself reading so slowly. In 30 minutes I would have barely read a few pages, even though I was not struggling with the content itself.
I found that it’s just that the language is so needlessly impenetrable. So many run-on sentences, so many odd turns of phrases, archaic terms (not relevant to Marxist theory), and bizarre sentence structures.
I have never read the original German text nor any other language translation, so I don’t have a point of reference. I don’t know how much of it is Engels’ writing style, versus the translator’s 19th century English.
A translation written in 1892 was not written for English speakers in 2026.
My question is: Would these works not become so much more accessible if we had a modern English translation from the original text?
If this would be considered useful, how could we realistically realise this for all of the fundamental works from that time period?
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I imagine that finding and hiring a translator who is familiar with Marxism to re-do the translations would be extremely difficult and expensive.
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Community translations are probably not feasible as translation requires a very specific skill set, not just fluent speakers.
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Machine translations might be possible, but it’s crucial to not lose any specific terminology and not misconstrue the meanings of certain quotes and phrases. The translator (whether human or machine) needs to have a strong grasp on Marxist theory and history to not distort the meanings in the text.
I would really appreciate everyone’s thoughts and suggestions on this. Maybe I completely dropped the ball on this topic.
P.S.
This is not just in regards to “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific”, it’s just the experience that inspired me to write this post.
I’m not unfamiliar with reading theory from that time period nor Marx and Engels’ writings in general. I’m also not completely unfamiliar with 19th century English, I’ve read plenty of fiction written in that time period as well.
A lot of valid points here. This method you describe is actually quite common for learning languages.
I only take issue with this:
Sure, 20 years ago we might have had to put up with them, but why now? Today we have the digital infrastructure and communities to distribute new works without publishing houses. We have the technology to revise and update old translations to more legible modern standards. Why shouldn’t we at least attempt to take advantage of the tools we have at our disposal?
Translating by hand is very hard and time consuming, and so you are unlikely to find someone to do it for you for free. The only tools you really have available for that are AI. Something like Qwen Max is indeed pretty good at translating as well as summarizing things. But actually expecting a person to translate a book for you is just too much to ask.
Yes, of course. I already elaborated on that in the post and in various comments in this thread. The most realistic idea would be to use some form of machine translation with specific parameters and have a crowd-sourced review and adjustment approach.
Whether it’s feasible or not depends on how well the machine translation works, but there’s good reason to believe that it’s already good enough these days for a task like this. (and if it’s not quite there, then it’s only a matter of months or at most 2 years)