Talk:Raden Saleh

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[edit] oddity from earlier

Cite error 4; Invalid <ref> tag; refs with no name must have contentAbout the language (see also UPDATE below):

The article looks like it was created in Indonesian ('Bahasa Indonesia' one of the standardized forms of Malay and the national language of the Republic of Indonesia) and then translated into English with some translation device, probably online. There are several elements that suggest this:

- 'Raden Pious': 'saleh', in addition to being used as a proper name, is a regular Indonesian/Malay word (a loan from Arabic) which indeed does mean 'pious'.

- The inappropriate use of 'photograph' and 'self-photograph'. 'Photograph' is one of the translations of the Indonesian word 'potret' which means both 'picture, photograph' (particularly of a person), and 'portrait'. Alternate (but less frequent) Indonesian forms/spellings are 'portret' and 'porteret', all loans from French 'portrait' through Dutch 'portret'. The verb 'memotret' can also mean both 'to draw [someone's] portrait' or 'to take [someone's] picture.

These are just two examples, there are many more. I may take a shot at editing it myself when I find the time.

About the contents:

The section dealing with the interpretation of the painting 'The Capture of Diponegoro' is rather speculative and IMHO does not represent a neutral POV. There has been a tendency among Indonesian nationalists and politicians to attribute nationalist motives to prominent 'Indonesians', but Raden Saleh went out of his way to be accepted by the colonial elite. I don't believe there is any historical evidence that he deliberatly put an anti-colonial message into that painting.

UPDATE:

The text appears to have been virtually copied from a text (see <http://www.nusantara.com/heritage/raden.html> by Sian Jay. Note: That (presumably original) text is written in readable English, whereas that of the current Wikipedia is 'scrambled'. I still assume the scrambling is the result of either an automatic translating device or of a very crude, word-for-word translation from an Indonesian source (see the evidence cited above). So the Wikipedia article is either based on an existing Indonesian version of the Sian Jay article, or it was translated back and forth repeatedly, possible to obscure its origin.

It appears, therefore, that the current article also violates the copyright (which is claimed by Editions Didier Millet).

UPDATE 2 (4 July 2006):

Copyright of the English text is also claimed by Hundeshagen (http://www.hundeshagen.net/English.htm) whose site also contains a German (http://www.hundeshagen.net/Deutsch.htm) and an Indonesian (http://www.hundeshagen.net/Bahasa.htm) page, each of which is almost identical in layout and illustrations, but contains totally different text. None of the versions are translations or even adaptations of any of the other versions.

All this makes authorship of the Wikipedia article unclear.

{unsigned)