alexpgp | A small find...

Back when I wrote translations for Plenum, they arrived as journal pages (literally; the translation secretary cut the spines off original journal copies and sent the appropriate pages), and as a result, although I just managed to open an old I-don't-know-what-format file of a translation I wrote in late 1990 or early 1991, I have long disposed of any original against which to evaluate its quality.

The title, author, and abstract of the article are:

On a problem of group choice

Yu. A Bobrovskii, O.K. Ilyunin, B.V. Novikov, A.Ya. Rapoport, and M.L. Sodin UDC 65.01

Khar'kov Radioelectronics Institute, Khar'kov State University, and FTINT, Khar'kov. Translated from Avtomatika i Telemekhanika, No. 9, pp. 101-108, September 1990. Original article submitted August 1, 1989.

A metric approach is applied to a class of group selection problems in which individual preferences are representable as linear series over a set of comparable alternatives, while group opinion is represented by relations such as dichotomic ranging, corresponding to the selection of a group of attractive alternatives from among all alternatives. Optimum algorithms are obtained for finding a set of attractive alternatives without resorting to search.

Plenum allowed translators to basically ignore complex expressions, requiring only that a series of five dots be inserted into the manuscript for any such expression, as in:

Now, in order to maximize F(R), it is necessary to use rule (3) when ..... and ....., since for these values of i, j, ....., there are no boundaries on the values of ..... imposed by the class ...... .

Plenum was some sort of initiation into this line of work, let me tell you.

Cheers...