Little Brother fan-trans into Slovak

Pavol Hvizdos just posted a Slovak fan-translation of my book Little Brother -- Maly brat. Man, I love the cool stuff Creative Commons licenses lets people do with my books!

Cory Doctorow: Maly brat

[#1 posted by wrybread, June 16, 2009 2:52 AM]

Mind if I ask how the CC license works with translations? Does the translator get a percentage of sales? Can anyone create a translation without prior permission? Does the author have any veto power? Etc?

[#2 posted by Anonymous, June 16, 2009 3:02 AM]

Well, in this case, Cory allows anyone to remix his book (and translating is a kind of remix) as long as they don't make profit with that. So, translator gets no money from it, it cannot be sold, and Cory has no veto power, as long as whoever uses it keeps within the limits of the CC license he used.

[#3 posted by Cory Doctorow, June 16, 2009 3:06 AM]

The license I use -- CC Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike says that anyone can make a translation (or other derivative work), provided that it's a noncommercial project and that they let others make derivates from their work on the same terms.

So if there was a commercial translation of LB into Slovak, the publisher could buy the rights from Pavel (after paying for a license from me), or commission an altogether new translation under license from me.

This just happened: the German publisher of Little Brother opted to commission a new translation for their edition, even though there was a CC licensed translation in the wild.

[#4 posted by PasteEater, June 16, 2009 3:25 AM]

Congrats Cory,

And thank you for all of your gifts.

[#5 posted by laderoda, June 16, 2009 5:00 AM]

Well done! And I get a kick out of the fact that the Slovak translation of "Little Brother" includes the word "brat".

I wonder if it's been translated into Serbo-Croat? The kids in Bosnia, Serbia and Croatia NEED to read this book....

[#6 posted by gtron, June 16, 2009 5:35 AM]

I have a question about CC
since you don't speak Slovak, how do you trust his translation? ultimately he could re=write the end or something?

i once made a music video for the first East European hiphop act to get signed to a major - 1997 - from Zlate Moravce, SK, called Trosky - look them up on YT
maly = small, brat is derivative form of brother, but cool it says little brat!

[#7 posted by Cory Doctorow, June 16, 2009 7:11 AM]

@5, Shrug. If it's good, or if it's bad and he enjoyed making it, that's good enough for me. Anyone who wants to do a better job can translate it for themselves -- they can even use his translation as a starting point, under the terms of the license.

[#8 posted by Anonymous, June 16, 2009 8:20 AM]

I read about half of the book in English and then did nopt have the nerves to continue. Will I be able to read it in Slovak (yes, my language)? Should I try?

[#9 posted by Wirelizard, June 16, 2009 1:55 PM]

A translation into Farsi (Persian) would be timely - any idea if that's under way?