How to Volunteer

We are always looking for volunteer translators. Volunteers may include:

• College and university faculty and graduate students with specialities in the history, literature, philosophy, or culture of eighteenth-century France
• Individual undergraduate students under the supervision of a faculty mentor. 
• Undergraduate classes in French or French translation.
• Non-academic volunteers with a good command of French and English, especially those with specific expertise and knowledge of technical subjects and terms. In the past we have welcomed high school French teachers, professional translators, practicing lawyers, diplomats, engineers, scientists, and people with expertise in such trades as printing, gardening, clockmaking, and bookbinding.

Volunteers select articles from among the more than 70,000 articles in the first edition of the Encyclopédie that have not yet been translated into English, based on their own interests and expertise. We use the copy digitized by the ARTFL Project at the University of Chicago.

By joining our group of volunteers, you will have an opportunity to see your work published on the World Wide Web and the satisfaction of knowing that you have contributed to making the Encyclopedia of Diderot and d'Alembert available to English readers around the world. Articles are posted to the site regularly, with attribution but without compensation.

We encourage (but do not require) volunteers to annotate their translations by providing (in notes) information such as: full citations and links to publications cited in the text; biographical information or links to such information about people cited in the text; definitions of archaic terms; indications of printer’s errors or other mistakes in the original text.

Note that because we are all volunteers we can do only light editing of translations that are submitted for publication. We therefore count on contributors to have sufficient command of French, English, and the topic to produce an accurate translation in readable, correct English and to conform to the guidelines in our Instructions for Translators.

If you would like to contribute, or would like more information, we'd like to hear from you at diderot-info AT umich DOT edu. We will ask you to provide some basic information about yourself and the title or titles of up to three articles you wish to translate. We will also ask you to complete and sign a Creative Commons license agreement.

We do not maintain a list of articles to be translated. To select an article to translate, search or browse this site. When you identify an article of interest, determine if it has already been translated or if it has been assigned to another volunteer for translation. If it is identified as “unassigned,” it is available.

Before requesting an assignment, please consider the length of the article and the amount of time you are able to devote to this task. Note also that we expect translators to translate any Latin (or other languages) that may appear and to render tables, equations, and other text not captured in ARTFL’s OCR version of the French original (note that these features do appear on the page images).