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Translating an old novel

de Alkanadi, 2015-oktobro-12

Mesaĝoj: 23

Lingvo: English

Alkanadi (Montri la profilon) 2015-oktobro-12 08:27:14

This is an idea that I had.
1- Find an old novel like Pride and Prejudice
2- Translate it into Esperanto (machine translation)
3- Edit grammar (machine editor)
4- Edit grammar, style, syntax, pragmatics, and convert awkward sentences into common usage (human)

The 4th step is the most expensive. It will probably cost several thousand dollars because I want the editor to receive a fair deal. I would want it to be high quality.

Incentives:
Editor <-- money.

Financial contributors <-- free copy of the work.

Me <-- small amount of money from selling it on Amazon and Kindle. I will be listed as the author of the work, which will be good for my CV.

Esperanto community <-- additional content.

Your thoughts:
Do you think it is worth trying such a project? Is it possible to raise that much money or are Esperantists generally cheap?

What are your thoughts?

PS. Just for your info, I only sold a few copies of my comic book. So I doubt that I will get a huge income from such a project, especially since the financial contributors (those who are the most interested in the project) would get a copy for free.

Vestitor (Montri la profilon) 2015-oktobro-12 10:23:38

My thoughts:

I'm sceptical of the value of translations of old books, or even newer ones come to that. When learning a language (or just reading) folks tend to seek out original literature. I can't imagine wanting to read Oliver Twist in Spanish when I can read it in the original English. Books written originally in the target language seem more valuable because they offer thoughts and ideas developed in the language and thus a more direct experience. Maybe it's different for Esperanto because the culture is shared?

I've tried before to lift the burden of translating by using machine translation in German and I find that on some parts I spend more time undoing bad auto-translation than I would if I'd just done it 'manually'. That's hit-and-miss though because sometimes it works.

I feel that if someone wants something so bad they ought to do some of the work involved rather than 'crowdfunding' something, farming out all the tasks to others and then getting the glory for being the grand overseer. A labour or love often produces good work, unfortunately, these days, everyone wants to be a quick-buck "entrepreneur".

sudanglo (Montri la profilon) 2015-oktobro-12 10:34:09

Well it might be a interesting experiment to try, to see if first getting a machine translation actually speeds up getting to a high quality translation (you could try just a page first as an experiment).

However my intuition is that all the work is in step 4, and that the machine translation might even prolong the process as it fixes your mind too firmly into a rather literal translation which may not be best.

Anyway to make money out of Esperanto publishing, you have to give a lot of attention to what there might be a market for.

I happily did once spot a gap in the market and could foresee that the book was going to sell well, and sold 10,000 copies of a book I had published. It was a colour picture dictionary of Esperanto, and at the time (1979) there was nothing like it in Esperanto.

So step 1 is sit down and work out what might persuade an Esperantist to part with his pennies.

Personally, I would pay for something that is a really good read and doesn't make me stop and say why wasn't this edited properly first. I get the impression that too much has been published in Esperanto as a sort of 'vanity project' and not submitted for critical international appraisal before reaching the printing stage.

Some of the best translations I have seen have been a cooperative effort with several people working on the text, and even sometimes between speakers of different languages (which is perfectly practical in the case of a popular book which has already been translated out of the original language into other national languages).

And today, the internet means that there is little excuse for not getting your efforts critically checked out by alilandaj Esperantists before publication.

Bemused (Montri la profilon) 2015-oktobro-12 10:40:08

Rather than an old novel you might have more success with anime, which started as something particular to the Japanese language, and has now become popular in other languages, or with a comic that is already popular in the original language.

There is less work involved in the translation of each episode, so you can get up and running more quickly.
Your audience can access the work in bite size pieces instead of wading into some lengthy tome.

You will get an idea of how popular the result is going to be without expending the massive amounts of time and effort involved in translating an entire book.

Miland (Montri la profilon) 2015-oktobro-12 11:01:12

I agree with Bemused that it would be a big investment of time and energy, even if you could save a lot of the work by using a machine translation. Extending his idea to comic books generally, perhaps a translation of a comic book version of your favourite classics might be worth considering. You would probably need the publishers' permission to translate an existing comic book, however.

Alkanadi (Montri la profilon) 2015-oktobro-12 13:40:50

Vestitor:I feel that if someone wants something so bad they ought to do some of the work involved rather than 'crowdfunding' something, farming out all the tasks to others and then getting the glory for being the grand overseer. A labour or love often produces good work, unfortunately, these days, everyone wants to be a quick-buck "entrepreneur".
First, I would do all the work myself, however I am not skilled enough for it. I have to farm it out.

Second, I doubt it will bring me any money but I would get some social credit (example: I can write it on my CV).

I agree with your other comments.

Alkanadi (Montri la profilon) 2015-oktobro-12 13:44:31

sudanglo:I happily did once spot a gap in the market and could foresee that the book was going to sell well, and sold 10,000 copies of a book I had published. It was a colour picture dictionary of Esperanto, and at the time (1979) there was nothing like it in Esperanto.

So step 1 is sit down and work out what might persuade an Esperantist to part with his pennies.
Good for you. If you made $1 per copy then that is 10 thousand dollars and I bet your made more than that.

It is hard to find a gap in the market these days. Especially, if someone is trying to sell information in an information age.

Tempodivalse (Montri la profilon) 2015-oktobro-12 13:50:33

Machine translation?? Seriously??

I've had newbies at Esperanta Vikipedio try to translate stuff from the English Wikipedia via automated translation. Those articles normally end up getting deleted outright, because it would take less time to manually write an article from scratch than to fix all the problems in the machine translation (which is often unintelligible).

Some unscrupulous people have actually gone around on Amazon selling machine translated works into Esperanto (as mentioned in a recent thread). It's garbage. Google Translate et al. might be OK for simple short sentences, but definitely not literature.

Alkanadi (Montri la profilon) 2015-oktobro-12 13:57:56

Tempodivalse:Machine translation?? Seriously?
That is just step one.
Some unscrupulous people have actually gone around on Amazon selling machine translated works into Esperanto (as mentioned in a recent thread
I was the creator of that recent thread. I was the one that pointed out the issue.

A human will still edit the work, unlike these unscrupulous people.

Sunjo (Montri la profilon) 2015-oktobro-12 17:02:55

Alkanadi:
What are your thoughts?
It would have to be a book that is also today considered valuable (because of it's language or because the story is timeless, or because it is really telling something about a different culture or about history that we would otherwise not learn).

I would not buy a book in Esperanto that I have already read or that I could read in its original language. This means "Pride and Prejudice" wouldn't be an option for me.

Difficult choice okulumo.gif

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