I just finished to read the Indie Author Survival Guide by Susan Kaye Quinn. Full disclosure: I love this book. I think every indie writer should read it. It’s a treasure chest full of advice, encouragement and plain useful stuff that nobody should miss. If you don’t own it already, don’t waste time and get yourself a copy.
Since I admire Quinn’s enlightening work so much, it caused me great pain to read stuff like this:
I recently signed an innovative, revenue-share contract to translate Open Minds into German. There were no publishers involved, just an agreement between myself and the translator. Because it’s revenue-share, the translator (who is based in Germany) is incentivized to help tap the German market, making contact with bloggers and reviewers.
[…]If you’re a well-selling indie, you can finance all of the costs of translation on your own, but I actually think there’s an advantage to doing the revenue-share: my translator is making a business out of translating and then promoting his translated works. He’s a fellow indie author, just an ocean away.
Very cool.
My reaction in a nutshell:
Translators are not “fellow indie authors” (although they do produce intellectual content). Treating them as such shows a lack of knowledge at best, a lack of respect at worst.
The “Translate for Royalties” model (“TfR model” from now on) has been gaining ground for a while. More and more authors have been experimenting with it, and a few websites began advertising it as a “free” way of reaching new markets. I believe it’s an unsustainable model that shouldn’t be encouraged, else it will result in the death of book translations (no kidding). There are two main reasons for that.
The first reason is simple: when you come to me, a translator, with a TfR proposal, you do not come bearing gifts. You come bearing risks. In fact, the TfR model is a way for an author to take a business venture (the translation) and put all the risk on their so-called “partner”. Think about it for a minute. You are telling someone to work for weeks or months, not for money, but for the promise of an unknown amount in royalties. How much will the translator earn in six months? In a year? Will that be even remotely close to their normal rates (and even in that case, will it be worth it to wait six months or a year to collect the money)? Or will the whole job turn out to be a waste of time?
Fact is, 50% of not enough is still not enough. If, at the end of the year, the translated edition of your book ends up earning us $10 in royalties (this happened; see below), for you, the author, it’s $5 in your pocket that you didn’t have before. For me, the translator, it means receiving $5 as compensation for weeks or months of work.
Would you work for weeks or months in exchange for $5? Unless we’re talking about volunteer work, I don’t think so.
“But I cannot know in advance if the translation will sell or not!” Sorry, but it’s not your translator’s problem. They have a job to do and should be paid for their time and their expertise, just like your editor and your cover designer. Come think of it, I’ve never heard of an “edit my book for royalties” model or a “do my cover for royalties” model. I wonder why.
The second reason has to do with marketing. Translators are not marketers, they didn’t study marketing and cannot be expected to improvise it. It’s completely unfair to have someone market your book for free after they already translated it for free. What are you doing to help your collective success? Nothing. While the other person is doing everything.
If that’s a relationship, I’m gonna call it an abusive one.
(no, “I wrote the book!” is not a valid excuse. The book was already published and earning you money before you decided to have it translated. You didn’t write the book specifically for your translator, so you didn’t contribute to this “partnership” at all)
The success of the TfR model would spell the death of professional translation. I’m sure of that. In a world where the income of a translator were completely uncertain (it already is quite unstable, given that it’s a freelance job), very few people could afford to translate full-time. Soon, the only translators available on the market would be young people living with their parents, and the partners and spouses of affluent people who could afford to support them. The average quality would drop, and the scarcity of freelancers available would cut the quantity considerably. It wouldn’t take long before everybody figured out that being a translator just isn’t worth it and abandoned their glorified hobby for a real, lucrative job.
The end.
How do I now all this stuff? Because I’ve experienced it. I used to offer a hybrid, cash advance + royalty sharing model (notice that I was still asking for cash up front) and I actually worked for six months on a website that promotes the TfR model (no, I’m not linking it, and I just removed their name from this post. I don’t want to give them traffic). I lost count of the words I translated during those months, but I’m sure I was well past the 500,000 line. Eleven months after I begun, do you know how much I earned in royalties for translating all those words?
$243.18. Most of which from the only two books that actually sold.
That’s an average of $0.00048 per word (and I’m being conservative with the word estimate). Less than a twentieth of a cent. But, hey, I helped authors reach new readers, right? Right?
My point is: if you want to be translated, but can’t afford to, seek out translators willing to do volunteer work. Because that’s what you’d be asking them to do if you offered them a TfR contract. At least be honest about it.
Otherwhise, if you’re seriously interested in reaching foreign markets, invest money. Find a good translator and pay their fees. They will still be interested in doing a good job (to get more work from you and to build up their reputation) and you will have paid honest money for honest work.
Nobody should be forced to work for free just to satisfy your vanity.
P.S. The saddest thing about Quinn promoting the TfR model is that, in other parts of her book, she insists that indie authors need to “invest time and money in editing/copyediting/cover art for [their] book”. Looks like we translators are children of a lesser god. The Survival Guide is still a great book, though, so buy it. Seriously.
Indie Book Translations 
I disagree. Maybe the US marketplace is different, but in Italy you have little choice. For example, I am writer of fantasy novel. I am NOT a self-published author nor I pay to publish books. I am paid. I get a percentage for each volume sold, usually from 8% to 12%. Fantasy is a “second league” literature in Italy, differently from USA, where is quite popular. So, selling more than 5,000 books per year is a great success, if you consider that 60% of Italians do not read a single book per year.Not just fantasy: any book! So, if I want to access a wider and richer marketplace, I have to publish in English language. Of course I cannot write directly in English. My English is ok to write a comment like this, not to compete with English language native writers. So I have to get my novels translated. I wrote to several (serious and selected) publishers in USA but all of them told me the same: we have such a production in USA that we do not need to translate foreign authors. To translate a book like mine from Italian to English cost about 3,000 EUR to have a quality that is comparable to the one of the original work. Since I get usually from 1.00 to 1.50 EUR per volume, I should sell at least 2,000 books and invest my whole revenue in translation. So, revenue sharing is the only option I have.
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I understand your position, but again, that’s not your translator’s problem. If they do a job for you, they should get paid. End of the story. If you can’t afford to pay a translator… well, it’s not like your doctor prescribed you to enter the USA market (and I’m writing this without sarcasm).
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I disagree again.I do not dispute the fact that a translator should be paid. On the contrary, I am convinced that a good translator is worth as much as a good author, so much so that, at least in Italy, many translators are also writers, if we consider the narrative. The point is that usually translation is paid by the editor, not the author. So, if USA editors are not interested to translate foreign authors,foreign authors have to find a different commercial approach. One of these approaches is risk sharing, a business model that is used in many different sectors. Risk sharing is a peer to peer agreement between the author and the translator. In practice the translated work becomes property of both, since it is really a common work (a translation is never SIMPLY a translation, but a real rephrasing of a work). So both “authors” share the risk that the work is not successful, but of the work is successful, the translator get much more that what he/she (they, in old English) could obtain if paid one-time. You forget that also a book is a job for an author, and also an author “should be paid”, but the point is that it is the marketplace to decide if a author’s job should be paid. So, risk sharing is not such a outrageous proposal. Up to the translator to decide if accept it or not. Well, it’s not like his/her doctor prescribed him/her to make business with an author (and I’m writing this without sarcasm).
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Here’s the fundamental flaw in your logic: authors and translators do different things. “Authors should be paid” doesn’t make sense, because authors do not provide services. They sell products, which are known as “books” (sometimes employing a middleman known as a “publisher”). An indie writer isn’t much different from a company that makes valves, from this point of view: both create something and put it on the market. There is no “deserved” income, simply because people can choose not to buy their product, in which case the author or company isn’t owed any money.
On the other hand, if a book or a valve gets sold, then the author or the manufacturing company deserves money equal to the price of the product (minus sales taxes, distributor discounts, and so on). And the very same thing is true about translators: if you purchase my services, you have to pay for them. Unlike an author, however, I don’t put good on the markets: when I translate a book, it’s because an author or publisher chose to trust me with the task. Therefore, every instance of my work corresponds to an actual service done to someone. And this is why translators should be paid.
There’s another point I must stress. If you want someone to translate your book, promote it, and generally speaking invest in you without asking for any upfront payment… then you’re not looking for a translator. You’re looking for a foreign publisher, which we translators are not. We don’t have marketing teams, we don’t have a big cash flow that can make up for delayed income and we don’t have a whole bunch of strings to pull. We’re individuals, with limited time and resources. More importantly, we’re professional service providers and should be treated as such.
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Well, translation can be considered a service for a manual, a technical document, an essay, but in my opinion, the translation of a novel is another cake. By the way, if translation is requested by an editor, it is a service, but if an author and a translator decide to offer an editorial product on a foreign marketplace, they are both “authors”. It is a matter of agreement. It’s a different business model. Up to the translator to decide if they is interested. An Italian novel translated to American English could be even different from the original, because when you write a novel you assume a specific cultural background. When you translate it for a different marketplace (and the USA one is different from UK one) you may need to change dialogues and even situations to adapt to the reader’s mindset. The alternative would be to add a lot of footnotes that could break the reading and damage the atmosphere that the author created. That si why those who have the know-how to do it, always prefer to read a foreign novel in the original language. Anyway, it makes no point to establish what’s right and what’s wrong in business (apart ethical aspects). Business is a matter of agreements: in each agreement each part try to understand advantages and drawbacks and the decides. So, if I make an offer of revenue sharing to a translator, it is up to the translator to decide if it is worth of or not. That’s business.
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Now I’m confused. Why would you need to change dialogues (with the obvious exception of idiomatic expressions) and situations in a translations?
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OK, let me make an example. Let us suppose that in an Italian dialogue I refer to Carosello, a famous advertisement show in Italy. There is no equivalent in USA. The problem is that such a show represented a cultural habit typical of several Italian families. That show contained advertisement different from any commercial you are used too. They were mini-show. Most of children were authorized to watch television until Carosello, not beyond. So, it can be used in a dialogue to means something that should be totally rephrased if you want to express the same concept in English.
Another example is visionarie. That word in English may have a positive or negative meaning, but in Italian has always a negative one. So, if you are using it, you are practically saying that person is mad. But you cannot translate just as mad. It would not have the same “taste”, the same “flavor”.
When you write a novel, you are writing only part of the story. The rest is created by the reader. A novel is the only piece of work that is created ONLY when it is read. The reader *is* an author of the story too. So, what you did not write is as important as what you did write. When you read the Odyssey, you will never be able to read it as an Ancient Greek would read it. Because you miss his cultural background. The result is that the Odyssey that we read today is different from the Odyssey that Ancient Greeks read even if the words are the same.
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As I already told you, foreign publisher in USA are not interested to spend money to translate a novel written in another language because they have a lot of works to choose from, written in English. So, promoting my novel in USA is a waste of money. Does not matter how good they are.
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So, if you believe that such a venture would be destined to fail… why would you want to drag someone (ie. a translator) into it?
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Because they told me that since I am a published author (not self published, but with a real contract with well-known Italian publishers), they “could” be interested to my works but ONLY if they are written in English. Practically, the novels are ok, the language is not.
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So they think you’re “okay” because you’ve been published by an Italian publisher… but also that you’re not “okay” because you’re books are in Italian?
In what language should books published in Italy be written in? Aramaic?
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Probably my English is not so good than I thought. I said that they could be interested to my novel SINCE I am a published author, but that it is not worth for them to spend money to translate them from Italian since the native production in English offer them a lot of material that need no translation. So they are not interested to translate foreign authors (me as well as others).
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I understood. I just think that they may be not as smart as they think 😉
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