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Happy Birthday, Buecherfrauen!

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It’s Women in Publishing (“Bücherfrauen“) Germany’s 25th anniversary this year. There is a big celebration coming up at the Frankfurt Book Fair this week, and here is my tribute to this great network.

First I woul like to clarify something: I don’t want any men to freak out and think with an organization like this, women want to turn things around and try and dominate you now 😉

Women in Publishing’s motto is: “For women, but not against men”.

Celebrating buecherfrauen networkingThe network was founded because there have always been a lot of women working in publishing, but in the beginning there was no woman at all at the top and even today there are still not that many.

I wrote about the power of networking earlier in another article and Buecherfrauen have certainly been a powerful network for me. Many years ago, I joined them in Germany, I attended events and sometimes helped organizing them as well. I would now like to say thank you to some of the women that I met somewhere along the way:

First of all thank you Marlies for telling me about the network in the first place. Thank you also to my first small local group in the North-West of Germany in the Bielefeld/Osnabrück area about 15 years ago for welcoming, inspiring and motivating me to follow my passion. Thank you to Inge, who was part of the group and introduced me to a big publishing house. And Inge did a great job last year editing “Pentecost”, the first self-published book that I translated into German. Thank you to Eva for offering to let me sleep on her couch in Frankfurt this year in case I wouldn’t find any other place to stay – it is a shame I can now not make it, but I hope I will be able to attend again next year!

Thank you to everyone whom I have met during all these years. And when I moved to London, it was only natural to join the sister organisation Women in Publishing in the UK – I was part of the committee here for several years and it was great to make new friends and continue networking in a different country, but in a similar way.

Here’s to everyone who has contributed to making the organization a success.

Happy birthday and cheers to you all!
anniversary-157521_640[If you are reading the following dates after October 2015, they will be outdated, but there are other interesting events at the Book Fair each year]

These are the details of the main event at the Frankfurt Book Fair:

There will be an award ceremony for the “Woman in Publishing of the Year”, the prize goes to Frauke Ehlers, long standing member of the network, the laudatory speech will be held by Silke Weniger and a welcoming speech by Federal Minister Manuela Schwesig, followed by the actual party.

Thursday, 15/10/2015
4:30 – 6:30 pm

Reading Zone of Independent Publishers
4.1 C37
Exhibition site

Before this event at the same place from 3.30 – 4.30 pm  there is another one, also organized by Buecherfrauen:

A talk with Indonesian Women in Publishing about literature and the book trade in Indonesia – the country is the Fair’s guest of honour this year.

Participants:

Laura Prinsloo of  Kesint Blanc Publishing

Kartini Nurdin of Yasayan Pustaka Obor

chaired by Eva Streifeneder

 

In addition, you can find Buecherfrauen at their stall 4.1 D55

You might also be interested in the following Book Fair event:

LiBeraturpreis 2015: Madeleine Thien

The LiBeraturpreis is the only German literature prize that is awarded exclusively to women from Africa, Asia, Latin America or the Arab World. In 2015, Madeleine Thien will receive the award for her novel “Dogs at the Perimeter” (German title: “Flüchtige Seelen”, Luchterhand 2014, translated by Almuth Carstens), which deals with the repercussions of the terror regime of the Khmer Rouge.

Saturday, 17/10/2015
4.30 – 5.30 pm

Venue:

Weltempfang – Stage, 3.1 L25,  Exhibition site

 

And if you speak German, you may like to read another tribute to Buecherfrauen, written by German author Nina George.

 

Related article: The Power of Networking

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Celebrating International Translation Day at the British Library 2015: Talking about Self-Publishing as A Panelist

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Last Friday I attended a big event at the British Library to celebrate International Translation Day. It was an inspiring day and I was on the panel of one of the sessions to speak about self-publishing as a translator.

This session was chaired by Stefan Tobler who spoke about starting out more or less as a self-publisher, but then starting his own publishing house with translated literature as a labour of love. He recently published “Southeaster”, a book that was first self-published by the translator and I wrote about this earlier in another blog post.

The other speaker was Rachel Ward, a translator who has worked with self-published authors herself and she mentioned her mostly enjoyable experience. Only a recent experience wasn’t so positive, because the rules how to work together had not been clear enough. And she talked about a problem that is generally not uncommon for those who translate into English: The author had a certain knowledge of English and wanted to interfere a lot to make his or her voice heard.

I personally have never had this problem, because I translate into German and none of the authors I worked with spoke my language. My problem is a different one: the rates for translations into a language other than English are usually low and I live in London, which is an expensive place, therefore I wasn’t able to continue working for German publishing houses when I moved here and I have been looking for new models to make a living.

At some point, I found out that translators have the right to self-publish a book if they hold the translation copyright, and if they do not hold it, they can get it back from the publishing house that published the translation. In addition, they need permission of the original copyright holder. (See another of my articles re. the procedures).

Then I mentioned the platform Babelcube, where self-published authors and translators can find each other to work together. Even though I like the idea, I am not happy about the fact that translators receive fewer royalties when a book becomes more successful. Therefore I would not work with them myself and only recommend the platform for beginners who are desperate to get some experience.

Apart from Amazon, which the majority of self-publishers are using to self-publish a book, there are other platforms like Smashwords which make sure an ebook is published in various other ebook stores. Neither Amazon nor Smashwords require you to pay anything upfront – they simply take a percentage of the royalties.

And someone in the audience asked whether it can hurt a translator and make them look less professional if they do self-published books. To this I replied, not in my experience, I even received an offer from a German publisher who liked my self-published translation, without applying for it and I had to refuse because I cannot affort to work for their rates. My advice is as followos: make sure the result looks professional and it doesn’t matter whether a book is self-published or not. I have even seen quite a few self-published books that looked more professional than certain traditionally published ones!

The way I got into self-publishing myself was through the cooperation with self-published British author and blogger Joanna Penn on a split-royalty basis, because I knew I could learn a lot about the process by doing this and here is a link to an interview she did with me regarding my work.

On the whole, I see a variety of potential ways how translators can earn an income these days:

  • Being paid by a publishing house or self-published author, for example per 1,000 words (the traditional model);
  • receiving a certain flat fee for a translation plus royalties;
  • working on a split-royalty basis;
  • using copyrights of out of print books;
  • especially for English native speakers: finding books that you think are worthwhile to be translated and help to get more books translated into English, not just by pitching to publishing houses, but also by self-publishing;
  • and last but not least: why not write your own books as well and even have them translated by colleagues who translate the other way round or with different language combinations? Whatever your plans and preferences look like: the power of networking can help you in every respect.

I have often heard self-published authors say they needed more than one book to make serious money and I think this can work for translators as well with a mixture of different models, as marketing one book can help to make others visible as well – the more you have out there, the better.

And I would love to see more translators as authors – I am sure, many have books in them – translation is a great preparation for writing after all.

But authors could also be translators, if they have a certain standard of language skills. I am sure some authors would be capable of doing this – provided they have a good edtitor – this would make sure they keep more of their own voice and they do not have to annoy translators by trying to interfere too much.

 

You can read more about the event on my fellow panelist Rachel’s blog here

 

And see also my related article: 5 Reasons Why Self-Publishing Could Help To Get More Books Translated Into English

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It’s International Translation Day Today

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International Translation Day 2015-Poster-1-Finland-SKTL scaled down etwas groesserDid you know that translators have a patron saint?

Each year on 30 September, it’s International Translation Day, and a normally rather invisible industry becomes a bit more visible. There is a reason for this very date, as St Jerome, bible translator and patron saint of translators, who translated the bible from Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek into Latin, died on 30 September AD 420. And in case you are wondering about the name: in some other languages, for example in German, Jerome is known as “Hieronymus”.

The importance of translations in an increasingly global world

The world has changed quite a bit since good old Jerome’s time and nowadays a lot more gets translated – we find translations in literally all aspects of our lives and rely on them. Nobody can speak every language! Yes, English is considered the lingua franca of the world, but the majority of the earth population do not have it as their first language and many cannot communicate in English at all.

The changing face of the industry

Within the translation industry, it is often talked about its changing face and this is above all due to the internet with so much more information at translators’ fingertips than in the past. Doing research has certainly become a lot easier.

And then there is CAT, “computer aided translation”, with special software that makes repetitive translation faster – and it works for certain types of texts. The so called translation memories, however, that come with these software programmes, are not extremely useful for book translations, especially not for fiction and the more creative kind of translations will probably never be entirely done by machines.

The role of translators can change even more

As those of you who have read my blogposts in the past already know, I believe that even more change can and should take place in the publishing world, and that is the translator as self-publisher or at least as someone who takes on a more active role than the one we are used to, i.e. dealing with the translation process only, and that’s it.

Translators have certain insights into books that others often do not seem to have. I remember looking at more than one cover of traditionally published books that I translated and thinking it had nothing to do with its content. Once the cover ended up being an ugly old shed which wasn’t mentioned in the book at all. I am not talking about a small publishing house here, but a really big one.

And then the title – a publisher I once worked with chose a title that was in German, “a lake in moonlight” or something along these lines – and there was nothing remotely like that in the whole book either. I questioned this and asked my editor why they wanted this title. The answer was: “It will sell well.” This particular publishing company went bust later, by the way, which might or might not have been a coincidence… Don’t get me wrong, there are many other publishing houses that are doing a great job, especially the smaller ones tend to be very committed to the actual books in my experience, but not everyone is like that.

When things like the examples mentioned above happened to me in the past, I sometimes doubted my own sanity. Did I miss anything? This must certainly be the explanation, I am just a little translator after all, right? Or is it just my personal preference to expect the book cover and title to be at least vaguely about the actual content? Please tell me, if you disagree.

I dare to claim that a translator could have done a better job in these examples, because hardly anyone – apart from the author of course – knows a book extremely well. And translators can also play a vital role in other respects: discovering books that deserve to be translated, but will otherwise not be picked up due to the language barrier, especially into English. So why should translators not self-publish, just like an increasing number of authors?

My own transition from translator to author to self-publisher

I have always talked about more potential flexibility when it comes to the roles of author, translator and self-publisher, and I will start shaking up the roles for myself soon – more about this later.

But for now: happy Translation Day, do whatever makes you happy – I wish you great success!

 

If you happen to speak German, you may also like to read another article with a different angle for International Translation Day on my blog “London und mehr”.

 

Related article: Retrieving Translation Copyrights – Important for Both Authors and Translators

And see me talking about International Self-Publishing at the Internation Translation Day Event on Friday 2 October at the British Library.

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The Power of Networking

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Some incredible figures

When it comes to work-related recommendations, nothing beats personal contacts. Yes, it is good to make connections online, but in my experience, personal meetings are even more effective. I first learned about this many years ago, when I attended a talk by Sabine Asgodom, who is a well known  book author and coach in Germany. She presented the audience with these figures:

So what are you waiting for?

In the beginning, I could hardly believe it, but the more I got into networking myself, the more I actually understood that this was not exaggerated. Of course, the 10 % achievements are still vital, but never underestimate the power of networking.

When I think of all the contacts I have made over the years, the opportunities that have come up and frelance jobs that I was able to do just because someone recommended me for something, I can definitely confirm these figures from my own experience.

Is it ethical?

Sometimes I meet people who have moral doubts about networking, they apologize for taking opportunities through contacts and believe they should have achieved everything in a “better” way. Don’t feel guilty, this is how most opportunities come up for everyone else as well, you were just not aware of it.

Those who have doubts are usually thinking of some kind of corruption and taking advantage of others, but this is not networking.

A book with networking advice

Now let’s talk about how to proceed when you are approaching someone you would like to network with. I would definitely think first what you have to give them and only afterwards what they may have to give you.

The book Give and Take gives valuable information and networking advice. And author Adam Grant is also providing a strategy to make sure others are not walking all over you after you have been generous first.

Useful organizations for authors and translators

Joining relevant organizations can make networking easier and I have tried out a numer of them. I am a member of the Society of Authors in the UK, because I find their legal advice and networking opportunities are just what I need – and they give legal advice to both translators and authors.

You can nowadays even join as a self-published author, if you have sold a certain number of books – just check out their eligibility criteria. And they have a network for emerging translators as well.

As a self-published author or someone who would like to beome one, you might also like to join the Alliance of Independent Authors.

Male and female networks

Networks have a long tradition and in the past they were often known as “old boys” networks, which excluded women and therefore women founded their own networks, for example Women in Publishing or Women in Journalism in the UK. A while ago, a man said to me: “It’s not fair, I want a network like this for men as well.” My answer was easy: nobody prevents you from setting up your own “new boys” network. 😉

You can argue whether female networks are still necessary today – theoretically women and men should now be equal, at least where I live. Conditions have definitely improved for women, but we are not quite there yet.

I believe we still need women only organizations, especially with the current influx of refugees in Europe. Although I am very much in favour of supporting refugees, I feel strongly about not going backwards, as they are usually from countries where females have far fewer rights than in our part of the world. In my opinion, women’s organizations can make a positive impact.

 

Related article on a female network: Happy Birthday, Buecherfrauen!

 

 

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Haroldo Conti’s “Southeaster”: Talk with Translator and Self-Publisher Jon Lindsay Miles

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A few days ago, I attended an event at the Free Word Centre here in London with Jon Lindsay Miles as the translator and self-publisher of  “Sudeste”, a book that was originally published in Spanish. He talked to senior editor Sophie Lewis of And Other Stories, the publishing house that has now picked up this book.

Everything started, when Jon Lindsay Miles discovered the long forgotten Argentinean book at his local library in the South of Spain. He was immediately gripped and wanted to translate it into English. But first he needed permission from the author’s heirs and travelled to Argentina to meet them in person. They were happy to grant him the right to translate and self-publish “Sudeste” – even though Haroldo Conti is well-known in Argentina, none of his books had ever been translated into English.

Conti was one of the people who disappeared in Argentina without a trace in 1976 after the military coup and was then probably murdered. The translator, however, stressed that he was not focussing on this fact, but on the book’s content and on the way he himself as a reader interpreted it.

In the story, atmosphere is important, the bleakness of the environment including a river and the reclusion of the protagonist. When Jon read part of the book, you could really tell how passionate he was about it. And when he spoke about his own life in a remote area in Spain, I couldn’t help thinking there might be some parallels between him and the main character.

In order to self-publish “Southeaster”, Jon even set up a little publishing house called Immigrant Press. At first, he did everything on his own, but now that the book was taken on by UK publishers And Other Stories, the new edition was going to involve an additional editing process. Editor Sophie Lewis confessed they had been a bit worried how Jon would react to any changes made to his work. But there was no need: the translator had no problem with it.

 

It was great to see how dedicated everyone involved is to “Southeaster”. Of course first of all the translator, because without him the book would never have been published in English. But then there are also the lovely people of And Other Stories, who can now help to find more readers for the book. And I met more interesting people at The Free Word Centre. This place is really, in their own words: a unique “international centre for literature, literacy and free expression in the world”.

 

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Overcoming Language Barriers with Pictures

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It’s a visual world and we may use it to our advantage

If you are reading this, I assume you like the written word, but let’s face it, what captivates and inspires our imagination more than anything? Pictures evoke immediate emotional reactions. They can therefore draw attention to material in foreign languages and spark curiosity.

Book covers can make an impact around the world

In my opinion, book covers can play an important role in achieving global success. One example is the cover of Er ist wieder da with the now well known Hitler image. The picture draws you in, even if you do not understand the language and you just want to know what this is all about. Unsurprisingly, the book was translated into many languages and they kept the idea of the image for all foreign editions.

Music is different

I used to think that English is accepted around the world and if in doubt, I would still go for it, but I discovered that hardly anyone of those who read my German blog are interested in what I say in English on social media.

When it comes to texts like books and blogs, I have the feeling that most readers are still expecting discussions in a language that they are really comfortable with, and this is usually their mother tongue.

In another article I touched on how social media in English works for international music, but I have now come to the conclusion that you cannot always compare it to books, articles and other texts. Like pictures, it appeals more directly to our emotions and in most cases, lyrics are not that important and they don’t have to be understood to enjoy the songs. Once the audience really likes or dislikes a piece of music though, people are more willing to discuss it in English, however basic their English knowledge may be. Sometimes they comment in their own language, even if hardly anyone else is able to understand it. And many listeners seem to care more about the visual appearance of musicians than about song texts. On the other hand, music itself can bring people from differnt countries together.

Pinterest is a visual social media platform

Thanks to blogger Renate Oetjens, who explained the benefits to me, I have now joined Pinterest. This social media platform relies very much on pictures and images do indeed often speak louder than words. I am still a newbie on this platform and I am learning more every day.

On Pinterest, you usually discover pictures before persons, although you can follow individuals if you want to. Therefore it shouldn’t be a problem to use the platform in more than one language, whereas this can sometimes frustrate people elsewhere if they have no clue what you are talking about and might feel left out when something interesting seems to happen in a language they do not understand.

At the recent Problogger conference, one of the speakers even described Pinterest as a “must” for bloggers. As much as I like it myself – in my opinion, nobody has to use a certain platform if it is not for them for whatever reason. For example, most people say you have to be on Facebook, but I disagree. I think it helps to really like what you are doing, otherwise you might give up sooner rather than later or readers can tell that you are doing something only half-heartedly. If you want a strong focus on pictures but don’t like Pinterest, you might prefer Instagram or Flickr instead as visually focused social media platforms.

Videos are popular and don’t always need spoken words

When it comes to visuals, one medium holds special attraction for many and that is videos and they can be shared on Pinterest as well. Therefore I have experimented again and created a new mini video with images and subtitles to show you another way to combine visuals with more than one language. This time, the film has no spoken audio, but comes with subtitles in English and German. You could even add more languages, if you wanted to. In case you are wondering: the music that I am using is from YouTube’s own audio library and I took the pictures myself, therefore I didn’t have to worry about copyright.

You can activate and deactivate the subtitles by clicking on “CC” at the bottom of the video once it is playing and if it doesn’t show the language you are looking for, the settings can be changed via the icon next to it.

 

 

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Social Media For International Self-Publishers

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It’s been a while since I last posted anything on this blog, but I needed some time to figure out what to do next, as communicating in more than one language isn’t always straightforward, especially when it comes to social media.

 

Multilingual communication can be challenging

I have done a lot of experiments and research and there is much information about social media on the internet, but unfortunately, most of it doesn’t work well for me. Especially Facebook has never been something that I enjoyed very much and I have given up on it for the time being. I tried to create different pages in different languages, but it was too much work and didn’t really lead anywhere. I still have a private Facebook account, where I find posts in different languages due to my very international contacts, and sometimes I see interesting posts that I can hardly read and often not at all, let alone comment on them. As much as I am in favour of learning as many languages as possible, there is simply a limit to it. Nobody can speak every language on the planet. I had to find a different solution for my needs, as I do not have one dominant language, but I communicate about as much in German as in English.

YouTube videos with subtitles in different languages

I have now decided to create a YouTube channel with audio in either English or German and subtitles in at least the other language. The following short video was mainly created for my German blog about London, therefore I have recorded the audio in German, but by clicking on CC you can choose to watch it with English subtitles. The subtitles allow me to use videos for my English as well as for my German blog at the same time and I am planning to do more subtitled videos in various other formats in future.

Here is my first short and humble video:

 

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London Book Fair 2015 part 2: Some Industry Trends

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Even more globalisation

At this year’s London Book Fair, Harper Collins’ announced their takeover of publishing houses in various countries. They intend to launch books in different languages simultaneously. Teams in a number of countries will cooperate to leverage the marketing.

I think launching books in different countries at the same time is an interesting model also for international self-publishers for maximum global reach and to make the most of their efforts.

And the general increase in globalisation means more translations are needed as well.

LBF 2015 lecture in Tech Theatre scaled

London Book Fair 2015, lecture in Tech Theatre

Content is vital – form can change

We saw the introduction of ebooks and audiobooks in the past, and new options like interactive content are now becoming more widespread. When signing contracts, you should bear possible future developments in mind, which can mean technical developments that do not currently exist. So it is actually a good idea to be prepared and stay up to date with technical innovations, whether you intend to use them or not.

Shorter forms are becoming increasingly popular

As I mentioned in my article about the London Book Fair and literary translations, there is a trend towards micro-payments, for example reading and paying for individual book parts and being able to stop buying more at any time, if you want. I have started reading a book in this way via Pigeonhole, the company that I wrote about last time, and I am enjoying it.

And especially when it comes to non-fiction,  the so-called Millenial generation seem to prefer shorter books even more than other age groups.

I must admit that I like shorter non-fiction books myself, which do not repeat certain aspects again and again, just to fill the pages or to remind me of something that I read earlier in the book. I would actually love more shorter non-fiction that contains the information I am looking for in a more compact way that doesn’t take so long to read. I think this is actually a good trend for self-publishers who have an advantage since they do not need to write a book of a certain length for a publisher, but can concentrate first and foremost on the value they intend provide for their readers.

 

Related article: London Book Fair Part 1: Literary Translation

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London Book Fair 2015

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Part 1: Literary Translation

 

London Book FairLondon Book Fair took place last week and as it was on my doorstep, I went all three days. My obvious first place to go was the Literary Translation Centre and one of the events I attended was called:

“Meet The Innovators”

The panelists were representatives of small British publishing houses that publish books in translation. One of them said he didn’t speak any of the languages they were dealing with and the language barrier was a problem which had led to legal problems. They were sued due to libel and copyright infringement. Now they are asking their translators to alert them to potential problems. At the end of the day, however, translators are not responsible for any legal matters. The whole issue did not surprise me and is one of the reasons why I believe that self-publishing could help to get more books translated into English. Some of the panelists were wondering why they had even been invited to this event in the first place – maybe because literature in translation itself is still regarded as innovative in English-speaking countries?

There was one true innovator on the panel, though: Anna Jean Hughes, the co-founder of The Pigeonhole. Her company was not even a year old and had already been nominated for the London Book Fair’s International Excellence Awards. The Pigeonhole call themselves “Your Global Book Club” and specialize in book serializations. You can subscribe via micro-payments for parts of a book, read them as you like, e.g. on your computer, via Kindle or iPhone app, and discuss the content with other readers and the author if you like. By the way: micro-payments are one of the new trends in publishing that I will write more about in my next article.

At The Pigenonhole, you get additional benefits like author interviews, audios and other material that is supposed to immerse readers in the world of the book. They take on books in English and foreign languages, which will be translated into English and the translations are funded by grants. Anna said they had 6 different native speakers among their staff, therefore I suspect they have fewer problems with language barriers than other companies. The book groups will be in various languages as well. Anna said books will only be published in hard back once they have reached a minimum of 5000 subscribers, which cuts out the risk. They work on a 50/50 royalty basis with authors and if a translation is involved, the publisher gets 40 %, the writer 40 % and the translator 20 % in addition to their translation fee. Sounds interesting to me.

And here is an interview with Pigeonhole’s other co-founder Jacob Cockcroft at the London Book Fair:

Another event that I attended at the Literary Translation Centre was the following:

“What Works In Translation?
The Critics’ Perspective”

First the panelists talked about something obvious and vital: a translation needs to promise commercial success, otherwise publishers won’t take it on. And the book should read smoothly like an original, but with some foreign flavour. If a book was not written at roughly the same time as the translation, the translator shouldn’t even try to translate into an old language version, it’s not doable. I agree, but I think you can still add a little flavour of the other time to the translation, similar to the way contemporary authors tend to write historical fiction.

Dialects are very tricky in translation. Everyone acknowkledged that they are actually untranslatable, but there are nonetheless a few cases out there, where people tried to translate for example Scottish English into a dialect of another language and the result was simply dreadful. So here is a word of warning for authors whose books contain a lot of dialect: it will be lost in translation, because even a flavour of the original dialect is difficult to achieve in translation.

The panelists went on to say that authors and translators should ideally be a good match and translators are almost like writers. A few translators are actually sometimes writers and vice versa. Just think of this famous example: Mark Twain translated several German books into English. I can even imagine the author-translator model as a great way for self-published authors who translate someone elses’s book if they happen to be fluent in that language and have an affinity to the author’s voice. In addition, I can say from my own experience that translations are good exercises for developing writing skills.

Finally, the panel mentioned that footnotes were no longer popular to explain something that is hard to translate, especially in fiction, because readers want a smooth reading experience.

And here are some legal aspects from:

“Please Sign On The Dotted Line”

In my last article about retrieving translation copyrights I assumed ebooks and print on demand would make it more difficult to retrieve translation copyrights from out of print books. There is a solution, however, that was mentioned at this event: just state in the publishing contract what out of print means, for example under 200 copies sold over a 12 month period. This addition can be important for translators’ and authors’ contracts alike. It was said, however, that smaller publishing houses tend to be more flexible if they are asked to adapt contracts than bigger ones.

When it comes to royalties, 25 % are common for authors and of this a translator should get 5 %. I have to say that unfortunately from my own experience and that of other German translators that I know, contracts often contain clauses that state, the percentage of the translators will decrease substantially or they still don’t get any royalties in case a book becomes a bestseller.

Last but not least, the panelists talked about the same issue as mentioned before: difficulties due to a lack of language skills at publishing houses that result in legal problems and translators are asked to help out. I would like to add, however, that nobody can speak gazillions of foreign languages and this means that to a certain extent publishers have to rely on translators in any case – or they translate only from “bigger” languages, which seems to happen a lot. As I said earlier, therefore I believe self-published translations could solve this problem.

 

 

In my next article (London Book Fair part 2) I will tell you more about new developments in the book industry.

 

 

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Retrieving Translation Copyrights: Important For Both Authors And Translators

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Some authors are now retrieving their copyrights of out of print books and become self-publishers. But what happens to book translations that are no longer in print?

The current situation

If you are an author, you may feel lucky if a foreign publisher is publishing your book in translation. And for me as a translator for German publishing houses, it was always a great feeling once a new book that I had translated came out and I could see piles of them in many bookshops. Most of the time, however, these books disappeared as quickly as they turned up.

Translations are a lot more popular elsewhere than in English-speaking countries, and publishers often like to take on successful foreign books for translation. A book that is already successful as an original minimizes the risk and there is sometimes a big marketing push when the translation first comes out. But bookshops have limited space and there will always be new books that need to be promoted. In addition, foreign authors can’t usually help as much with marketing as domestic authors. Threfore it doesn’t come as a surprise that many of these translated books go out of print after a while. Up to now this has usually meant the translation was lost forever.

Retrieving copyrights

Copyright in handAs I have learned a bit about self-publishing by cooperating with self-published author J.F. Penn, I was curious to find out whether I would be able to self-publish one of the out of print books that I translated in the past.

Book translators normally own the translation copyright by law, but most of the time they have to sign it away to the publishing house, at least in Germany, otherwise they don’t get the job in the first place. Therefore my initial step was to contact the German publisher in order to retrieve my copyright. After a while, they sent me a letter confirming they didn’t intend to publish the book anymore and they returned the translation copyright to me.

I knew that I needed to come to an agreement with the author as well, but she had died, I couldn’t get hold of her heirs or her former agent either and I wasn’t sure how to proceed, so I asked the UK Translators Association for advice. They said I needed to find the original copyright holder in any case, otherwise I could still infringe their rights, even though the author was dead and I have now contacted the original Australian publisher and asked them whether they know about the rights and I am also trying to find other ways to search for the original rights holder.

Self-publishing out of print translated books – a model for the future?

Whatever happens in my case is not the main issue here. The author is dead, which makes everything a bit more complicated than usual, but I would like to point out your options, whether as an author or as a translator.

Let’s bear in mind that it is necessary for the original author (or rights holder) to come to an agreement with the translator, who needs to hold or retrieve the translation copyright, and both should agree on how to split royalties as well.

By the way: Nowadays I would not want to give away any rights for good anymore, only for limited time periods, if at all, because due to ebooks and print on demand, books might theoretically never go out of print and I suspect it will be more difficult to retrieve rights in future.

 

I have contacted many people in the industry, including a large number of translators, and none of them knows of anyone who has used the approach I have mentioned so far, therefore it looks as if this idea is still new – but nobody discouraged me either! Why should we not make use of our rights after all? If you have heard of any case, however, where someone has already done what I am trying to do or if you have any other thoughts on this matter, I would love to hear from you.

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