Scroogled in Latvian, Italian, Portuguese
As an added bonus, the Italian magazine Delos Science Fiction has just posted Stefano Bonora's Creative Commons-licensed translation of my award-winning story When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth.
It's great to see such an emergent community of translators who are using their linguistic skills to make English-only works available in other parts of the world. I've done some amateur translation from Spanish, but it's hard to keep the motivation up when you're only working for yourself (as is necessarily the case when you're working with traditional copyright). The "derivatives-friendly" Creative Commons licenses allow amateur translators to share the fruits of their work, get friendly feedback, collaborate and gain reputation, encouraging them to do more and more work.
Now, if only more non-English works would be translated for us Anglos! Everywhere I go, I meet non-English-speakers who've read English writers in translation, as well as French, German, Russian, Japanese, etc -- lots of stuff gets translated out of English, but precious little comes to us, leaving us monolinguals with no choice but to live the provincial life of someone who can't compare their native literature to those of other lands.
Link to Scroogled in Italian (Reginazabo), Link to Scroogled in Italian (Decio Biavati), Link to Scroogled in Portuguese, Link to Scroogled in Latvian
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Well, translations make your works available for non English speaking people but also subject them to poor/bad translations. I myself spent several years without reading Gaiman books due to a poor translation of "American Gods".
You have a style that makes me wonder if you substituted your morning coffee by a full bottle of "santo daime"... quite hallucinating stuff. Not easy to translate in a way that it makes sense in other languages/cultures.
Translators have favorite texts they play with and bat back and forth. I'm starting to wonder whether "Scroogled" is one of them.
Now this is all well and good (and I congratulate you Mr. Doctorow), but when is someone going to get around to translating this book into languages that actually matter. You know, like Skolt Sami or Votic or !Xóõ, perhaps.
there was a pretty interesting translation of "Other People's Money" into New Zealandish on Escape Pod a couple of weeks ago.
But where's the LOLCAT translation??
And inevitably, Klingon.
I just read the italian translation. A very beatiful, disturbing piece of art. Now I'm tempted to delete all my google accounts...
5 demerits for dubious use of emergent.
however, you're dead right about the lack of translation *to* english - while it's sad that only commercially succesful authors, for the most part, are translated from english to other languages, the lack of inbound translation is tragic.
I think the fact that, as Cory says, "The "derivatives-friendly" Creative Commons licenses allow amateur translators to share the fruits of their work, get friendly feedback, collaborate and gain reputation, encouraging them to do more and more work" is only the most apparent effect of CC on translation.
There's something more, and it could be so worth exploring and exploiting these side effects: first of all, the concepts of faithfulness and original text as are determined by strict copyright fade -- if I can make a derivative work, when I translate I must not submit to the style directions of the publisher who owns the rights for my language, so that I can translate in a more experimental way without having to abide to the translation-treason dichotomy.
The third effect I see (there could be many more), is strictly related to Cory's call for more translations into English: if I'm not a native English speaker, according to tradition I should never translate into English. But if my work is released under a derivative-friendly share alike CC license, I can render the meaning even if in an unsophisticated way and encourage native speakers to review and refine style. This could invert the widespread trend towards the diffusion of Anglo-American culture around the world, and favour the diffusion of cultures from non English-speaking areas.