Nice post! There can be some surprising language-barriers between early modern writers and today's readers. I remember as an undergrad getting very confused by a passage from Locke in which he often used the word 'sensible.' I took him to mean 'prudent' and only later discovered he meant 'can be sensed'!
Unlike the Hobbes snippet, I didn’t feel like the Hume excerpt needed much translation to be accessible. I think I would decide on a case-by-case basis whether to read the translated version or the original rather than defaulting to one or the other.
I use his texts in the philosophy courses I teach; I love that website. I hope it continues to be available for a long time.
Many thinkers worth reading wrote in past centuries:
Some of them wrote in English and their texts are usually presented in the original, even when they use archaic spelling, punctuation, and style. (This is in contrast to foreign-language works which are often translated to a modern style.)
For example, in the past there were more uses of the comma, such as
And these examples are from the 1800s. The situation was worse in prior centuries when punctuation was mainly prosodic rather than syntactic, i.e. it followed rules of rhetoric rather than logic. For example, Daines’s Orthoepia Anglicana (1640) advised using a comma to indicate one unit of spoken pause, a semicolon for two, and a colon for three. Before widespread literacy, most consumers of a book would be listening to it being read aloud, so prosodic punctuation made more sense, but as literacy rates improved, more consumers read books silently and it made sense to punctuate based on the logic of the sentence.
The website EarlyModernTexts.com modernizes many works (including works from all of the authors listed at the start of this post) so that the meaning can be understood more quickly and accurately. The texts were written by the late Jonathan Bennett and are often assigned to undergrads. Bennett explained his methods in “On Translating Locke, Berkeley, and Hume into English.” Usually I refer to his texts as “modernized” but “translated” maybe makes it more clear that the texts aren’t abridged; his text will line up with the original work paragraph by paragraph and typically sentence by sentence. He doesn’t always indicate omissions but is transparent about any text added.
He has more details on his website about how the texts are modified. Two examples of modernization:
Notice that he omits the “landskip” sentence as a tangential flourish.
The texts all start with an explanation of his syntax:
Below are some examples of the opening pages of a few of the texts (there are EPUB/MOBI files as well). Selected texts have been narrated into audiobooks, including Leviathan, The Prince, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, Descartes’s Meditations, Hume’s Enquiry, and Locke’s Second Treatise of Government.