Non-English Books

Permies seems to be by default an English language forum.

We have a very international user-base. I know there are lots of people who speak English as a second language here.

I expect non-English speakers may sometimes browse the content by using translation tools.

There's a really cool Japanese book that I have that I want to talk about... but it's not very accessible to the English audience. However, translation tools make lots of things more available in the modern age. It's called "家族で楽しむ自給自足 (Kazoku de tanoshimu jikyuujisoku) - Let's Enjoying Farming in the Family" I would personally translate it as "Having Fun Homesteading with your Family"

It dedicates 1-2 pages on different topics oriented around homesteading in Japan. It talks about growing vegetables and rice at different scales, making charcoal, basketweaving, fishing, preserving food, making thatched forts for your kids, and dozens of other topics.

I'd love to talk about it in more detail, but I wonder...

Is it worth posting about?

When I was at university, there were three or four amazing books in Arabic.  I can't remember the name, but they were written between 800ACE and 1100 ACE in Al Andalusia (now Spain).  I saw a few chapters translated into English and it was amazing stuff, like using ridge and furrow to your advantage by planting on the ridge during the wet season and on the furrow during the dry.  How to plant to capture dew and the advantages of mini air wells and how you can dramatically improve both crops by including trees near your annuals or by decreasing the size of the field to half acres and having more hedgerows.  Stuff like that.  

But things moved quickly and I lost track of the name of the texts.  I had hoped one day to learn Spanish or Arabic so I could read them (they are translated into Spanish but not English at that time) but, I'm crap at languages.  

I think this might have been one of the text, but I'm not sure.  https://permies.com/t/54065/Muslim-Spain-Permaculture#470153  

r ranson wrote:When I was at university, there were three or four amazing books in Arabic.  I can't remember the name, but they were written between 800ACE and 1100 ACE in Al Andalusia (now Spain).  I saw a few chapters translated into English and it was amazing stuff, like using ridge and furrow to your advantage by planting on the ridge during the wet season and on the furrow during the dry.  How to plant to capture dew and the advantages of mini air wells and how you can dramatically improve both crops by including trees near your annuals or by decreasing the size of the field to half acres and having more hedgerows.  Stuff like that.  

But things moved quickly and I lost track of the name of the texts.  I had hoped one day to learn Spanish or Arabic so I could read them (they are translated into Spanish but not English at that time) but, I'm crap at languages.  

I think this might have been one of the text, but I'm not sure.  https://permies.com/t/54065/Muslim-Spain-Permaculture#470153  

I fantasize about having a modern Library of Alexandria type of deal on the internet. All of human knowledge accumulated and available to everyone. There is so much out there that isn't accessible because of language barriers, or limited publishing, or the fact that it hasn't been digitized. Project gutenberg is basically trying to do this... but they don't have the resources and copyright limits them tremendously.

Especially with ancestral skills and things that humans have been doing for millennia. Woodworking, masonry, metallurgy, crafts, art. These things have a lot of old texts in every language. And a lot of it is still applicable today.