Marcel Barang has the noble goal of translating and publicizing modern Thai prose literature via his website (English and French versions). In the preface to his anthology The 20 Best Novels of Thailand, he explains why much Thai literature is not very good by Western standards (“Too many Thai novels, I found, are dripping with honey and rosy beyond belief”) and why there is so little available in translation. And at the bottom of the Menu page, there is a link to the Thai On-Line Library – Bitext Corpus maintained by Doug Cooper, which has parallel translations:
The Thai Bitext Corpus is a collection of Thai and (mostly) English parallel translations or bitexts. The complete library can be searched for usage examples, or individual texts can be read in a variety of layouts. Bitext searches allow either Thai or any available second language (L2), and use an extended AltaVista ‘advanced match’ syntax.
(Via Plep.)
Absolutely unrelated: does anybody know how to do search on Plep? I remember she(?) put some info on topic I’m interested in, and then it dissolved in Lethe waters..
He’s a he; you might e-mail him (nutcote at nutcote demon co uk, separating the last four with dots) if there’s something specific you’re interested in. Otherwise, all I can think of is googling [plep, X] and hoping for the best. (Yo, Plep, you listening? Search functions are a good thing!)
Tatyana: You could do a Google search like this:
site:www.nutcote.demon.co.uk inurl:nutlog (your search)
About the Thai bitext site — it seems like a great resource, but it’s a pity that they’re using a legacy encoding. But then I suppose it would be quite a project to convert all that content.
many thanks!
Absolutely related: I read Utsana Phleungtham’s The Story of Jan Darra (in translation) years ago and it’s the kind of novel that stays with you. I don’t know if you’ve read it but it’s a very different kind of story from what I usually see in literature. In some ways it’s like folk tales or Greek drama in that what’s usually unspoken subtext, in this case sexual competition between father and son, is the surface plot. Strange and wonderful novel.
Hi – there is actually a search box on my root page at http://www.nutcote.demon.co.uk – and you’ve just prompted me to respider it ;). But I’ve found that Patrick’s Google method works just as well, if not better.
kattullus: Thanks for the recommmendation; Barang gives a ten-page excerpt, and the whole book seems to be available quite cheaply.
Plep: Thanks for letting us know!