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.
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.
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