Having studied martial arts for over four decades now, I have accumulated a large collection of historical papers and photographs, some of them dating to 1920 and before. Since these materials are not in the best condition, a few years ago, I started the project of converting everything into digital format in order to protect the material and have it available in the future. Since this project is mostly completed now, with these publications, I will begin to make the material available to a wider audience. All publications are available in electronic format only at this time.

As for the translations offered here, an often overlooked facet consist in the two types of translations in existence. These are

• translations, which basically ''move'' the text to the reader,
• and translations requiring the Reader to ''approach'' the text.

Prior to start reading a translation, one should have made a decision on whether to read a simple and easily understandable Book, or whether the reader wants a translation, which is as close to the original as possible. These viewpoints encompass a large area, for which there will hopefully be other Translations available in the future, in order to meet the requirements of experts, beginners and interested people alike. The way I have attempted to translate all martial arts documentation is best described by the Chinese translator Yan Fu (1853-1921):

 Having fused and gathered the marvelous principles of the whole text in my mind, I lower my brush to write the words, and, if the rendering is a good one, it will suffice to cover the meaning.

If the principles behind the terms in the source text are very profound and hard to explain, then the context is used to reveal the meaning.

While the majority of the documentation offered consists of translations, some publications have been transcribed instead. The goals when transcribing and proofing are:

1. To respect the author's intentions, and
2. to achieve consistency, completeness, and correctness in your transcription.

Consistency in transcribing makes your work understandable, and makes it possible to provide it in other formats, such as HTML or PDF. How you transcribe features of the layout and formatting of your text should remain consistent throughout. For example, if you use tabs to indicate the start of paragraphs, do so throughout; don't mix tabs with invisible indents set via the margins.

Completeness means that you've transcribed all the relevant sections of the text available, and checked to ensure that you haven't missed any pages, paragraphs, sentences, lines, or words. A transcription should recreate all of the author's text, but not necessarily the layout details like running headers and page numbers.

Click here to open the catalog with currently available publications.