About the Dafcast.Net Project

Welcome to Dafcast.Net. The goal of this project is twofold:

1. To produce a translation of the Talmud Bavli into modern, readable English with just enough interpolation to ease understanding by someone with moderate experience in learning Gemara. The translation would be made freely available online and covered by a Creative Commons style license.
2. To turn that translation into a series of podcasts, interpreting the Gemara as a “script” for a “radio play” that enhances an understanding of the text by using different voices and audio cues to express the structure of the text.

While this sounds like a large project, we have the Internet. Consider that there are 2,711 dapim (double-sided pages) in the Talmud Bavli, and that translating one daf takes between two and three hours.

If 500 people volunteer to translate just one daf….

If another 500 people volunteer to translate just two dapim….

And if another 400 people volunteer to translate just three dapim…

Then 1,400 of us, spending as little as two hours each or as much as twelve hours each, will have finished the job.

Perhaps you are part of an organization, class, or group that wants to sign up for an entire chapter as a group project. Or perhaps you have a few friends, and as a group you’ll divide up a single daf.

“The work is not yours to complete, but neither are you at liberty to ignore it.” — Rabbi Tarfon

If you don’t feel up to translating, but would like to help with editing, scriptwriting, recording, or post-production, please sign up for an account and indicate your areas of interest in the signup form. We’ll be in touch.

If you want to participate in creating the translation, here’s the procedure:

1. Sign up for an account
2. Browse the list of dapim until you find one or more that you want to reserve. (Because we hope to be ready to catch the Daf Yomi as it flies by, we hope you’ll start by looking at Kiddushin or Bava Kamma, which are due up soon.)
3. Sign up for those dapim
4. Write your translation. Please read our style guidelines. You may refer to existing English translations while working on yours, but please be careful not to violate anyone’s copyright.
5. When your translation is done, share it with our editorial team.

Note: If you reserved a daf and then we haven’t heard from you in a while, we’ll try to check in with you before releasing your reservation to someone else. But please don’t bite off more than you can chew!

Our preferred platform is Adobe Buzzword. You can use Buzzword to edit your work, or upload a Microsoft Word or OpenOffice.org file to your Buzzword account. Using Buzzword helps us protect everyone’s privacy, ensures uniform formatting across all our pages, and enables the collaborative editing process that will be at the heart of our project.

What happens after you’re done?

We’ll transfer your translation to our system from Buzzword. It will be marked “unedited” at first. Soon, one of our team of editors will go over it, checking for accuracy and completeness and making whatever adjustments are necessary to bring it into our common style.

Following this, another team of “scriptwriters” will adapt the daf into a script for our podcast. Other volunteers will record the various segments, and the podcast will be posted as well.

Meanwhile, you can browse other dapim and add comments, suggest edits, etc. We want to harness the power of the community to make this a rich and valuable resource, while still using a small group of trusted editors to forestall vandalism.