| I came up with this idea when I was contemplating the fact that there's no good translation of Ludwig Feuerbach's books. The only translation of The Essence of Christianity was done, like, a hundred and fifty years ago by George Eliot, who retained the "Du" forms, thus making what I assume to be a perfectly approachable German text into something halfway between a textbook and the Bible. Unfortunately, I don't speak German, either.
I think that an Everything Public Domain Foreign Language Translations Project would be an excellent use of the structure of Everything. This idea should be a lot less controversial than "Why should Everything be only in English?." This is what the Internet was meant to be, baby.
Now, here on Everything we have noders from many countries, and those noders speak many languages. Moi, je peux parler une langue et un demi. And those noders for whom English is not their mother tongue are still known on Everything for their skills in English. Furthermore, those noders who want to learn another language could benefit vastly if they had lots of bilingual material and commentary from fellow-noders.
So here's my idea.
1: Node some public-domain piece (or a piece covered by the laws of Fair Use) in its original language. Only node small ones, or break it up into manageable chunks. For example, one might node Nietzsche's Also Sprach Zarathustra by section. You wouldn't even need to actually understand the language of the text, just so long as you transcribed it carefully.
2: Translate those pieces which are written in languages you understand well. Don't bother with pieces unless you have a literary understanding of both the language in question and the "target tongue," English. Everything isn't really Everything, after all -- it's only everything cool, and a mangled or shallow translation eating up bandwidth is a waste of continuum -- both time and space.
Now, I can guarantee that a really good translation will get upvoted like mad. Especially if it's better than somebody else's translation. Just imagine, you multilinguals out there, how much experience you're missing out on, being unable to exercise your skills.
I mean, people sharing literary and linguistic skills in an international forum, semi-competitively -- this is the Internet at its best.
And now, a step in the right direction....
Zarathustra's Vorrede
Epigraph for a Condemned Book
Hiragana Ordering by Kuukai
Candide (blaaf noded both the original French and an English translation he found at www.literature.org, who apparently claimed it was a public domain translation. In any event, the English is noded separately from the French, so anyone could come along and put up their own, new translations in the French sections.)
Till Eulenspiegel (Apatrix is noding his own original translation from the German that he found on the Gutenburg Project.)
In the Terrible Night (Courtesy adamk.) | 
