Translations of USSME and USMM books

[jwsleser]

A friend informed me of these translations of some of the Italian official histories.

Internet Archive Italian Officials

All four volumes of Montanari's A.S. are there as well as all the R.M. volumes. You will only see one USMM volume in the link (volume IX), but when you click into that volume, there are links to the other volumes in the series listed underneath.

A good source.

Pista! Jeff

 

[Dili]

Gosh! what a disastrous translation of mine warfare book, if others are at that level i think these books will make much more damage than help.

 

[jwsleser]

Dili

Yes, I noticed that. Dredging instead of sweeping. Clearly a purely mechanical (computer) translation. That being said, it is much better than nothing. Any serious student will be okay if they take the time to look-up words that don't make sense in the translation using a good dictionary. Of course, it will help to have the original Italian version.

I spent the big bucks back in 1988 to buy a Collins Sansoni dictionary. 2277 pages of translation goodness. It has helped me puzzle out many Italian military terms. Money well spent.


Surprisingly, my copy of TM 30-259 has been less useful.

 

[Dili]

There are entire paragraphs that are incomprehensible. I know somewhat what is being said because i have Italian naval terms knowledge and technical background for WW2 period. But for anyone else several paragraphs will be lost. I agree this appears mostly computer generated and then edited over. I am not dismissing there was a big effort here but it is poor text result. The map and diagrams might be the great advantage here.

PS: being Portuguese i have a Latin advantage, i did not really needed a propose dictionary to work with Italian texts. I usually needed to check some words but since most texts are technical in nature it is relatively simple. If i would be reading a novel in Italian it would be much more difficult.

PS2: I retire what i said about charts, they don't respect what ships mined what locations.

 

[Andreas]

I just read the entry on the battle of Cape Spada, and if I didn't already know what happened there it would have been hard to follow. Having said that, because I did it really added value, given my copy of that book is in Italy and I cannot get there.

All the best

Andreas

 

[Dili]

Yes, it is basically that, if you already know, you might get more than you already have albeit loosing time and may even get an headache.

 

[jwsleser]

The Montanari books are the ones I was concerned about. Those translations are pretty good. I didn't look all that close at the USMM books, but happy that they are there.

 

[DrG]

Thank you for this reporting! It is a pity that Robert Denny II hasn't uploaded also the scans of the original Italian books, given that he surely scanned them in order to make these machine translations.

 

[jwsleser]

You can find scans of the Italian originals HERE I know many of the USSME, including the Montanari set, are there. I haven't checked for the USMM books.

 

[DrG]

Thank you Jeff, but I have already explored the "Biblioteca Militare" Issuu page by the Historical Office of the Italian Army. Unluckily, given its owner, it doesn't provide scans of books by the Navy and Air Force.

 

[Andreas]

DrG is correct, I think the only naval one is East Africa.

All the best

Andreas

 

[Andreas]

Most of the USMM book translations seem to be gone.

Does anyone per chance have copies of the section on the battle of Cape Spada from Azioni Navale?

All the best

Andreas

 

[Andreas]

Got it.

I downloaded all of them, and they can be found here:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/zf8mwpvzn6dx82x/usmm-9-traffic-with-albiania-greece-the-aegean.zip?dl=0

Ignore the title, it's all 25 PDFs in the zip file. Download at your own risk, I have a Mac so don't care so much about viruses.

All the best

Andreas

 

[jwsleser]

Glad you found it. I didn't realize that all the naval volumes were there.

 

[jwsleser]

While working with the individual that is making the maps for Infantrymen of the Air, I needed to send him a scan of a map from vol III of Montanari's Le Operazioni in A.S. Rather than go through the trouble of scanning my copy, I figured that it would be easier to just screen print the map from the English translation. I was surprised that Schizzo n.79 wasn't in the translation. A quick check demonstrated that the entire Chapter 9 (La nuova pause operativa) was missing from the translation.

RE: USMM books. All the translations are still available at that site (https://archive.org/details/usmm-9-traffic-with-albiania-greece-the-aegean/USMM 1_Statistical Data/).