Tuesday, October 21, 2008

Market for books in translation

The Frankfurt book fair sounds like it's a lot of fun for publishing professionals, but it also sounds like the market for books to translate hasn't been changed much by technology: Wheeling and Dealing and Finding Books to Translate Into Dutch. Much of the information seems to be passed between people who know each other.

1 comment:

Mohammad Mahdian said...

There's an interesting market for book translation in Iran, a country where international copyright laws are not enforced. When a new popular book is released, publishers get into a speed race to translate it into Persian, some even splitting the book between several translators. The result is that one, or sometimes multiple low-quality translations of the book is published very quickly after the release of the English version (I think it took them just a couple of days for the latest Harry Potter book), and that deters other potential translators from publishing higher-quality translations of the book later.