The Business of Writing: More on Translating Your Book by @OlgaNM and more than one #giveaway!

Today I am delighted to welcome back author-friend Olga Núñez Miret for Part Two of translating your books from English to Spanish and vice-versa. Part One may be viewed HERE.

Olga Author Translator (mailto:mmxrynz at hotmail dot com)
http://eepurl.com/baUcO

Olga translated one of my novellas, The Challenge, into Spanish as EL RETO, and she did a fine job! 

In Olga's words...

It can be a judgment call to decide how to approach any given work of translation. There are two concepts that seem to be at war with each other, that of fidelity (equivalent to translating exactly the text, word by word, trying to preserve the style as closely as possible, that tends to be used for certain authoritative texts, like legal texts, religious texts…) and transparency (the creation of a text that nobody would know had been translated from an original and it appears to have been written in that language because it sounds, or reads, very natural). The first results in a literal translation and the second in an idiomatic one.

These ideas always remind me of a novel I read years back called Loosely Translated (by Simon Hugh Wheeler, an indie writer who approached me through Goodreads), where the novel of an English writer, whose quality of writing seems to have degenerated as the number of novels in his thriller series increases, is picked up by a Spanish publisher who decides, without reading it, to get it translated to Spanish. The selected translator is a talented female writer who can’t find a publisher for her books. She can’t believe how bad the novel is and after feeling frustrated by her task, decides to become creative and completely changes the novel. It becomes a great success, and the English writer, who is invited over, can’t understand what the readers are going on about at a Q&A session. Well, I’ll leave you to imagine the rest.

Why would anybody want to have their books translated?

1. We all know how big a competition we face to try and sell books. Making it available to a wider audience is always a great idea. In the case of Spanish, it has 518 million speakers across the world, 427M as a native language. It is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. It is also used as an official language by the European Union, the Organization of American States, the Union of South American Nations, and by many other international organizations.
2. These new markets are less crowded. Although the offerings in Spanish are increasing, the number of e-books available in Spanish is much smaller than those in English. And of course there are retailers that will be more interested in Spanish books.
3. The same as is the case in English, there are blogs, Facebook pages, reviewers, reporters, critics, writers and readers looking for books in Spanish. I can say that with regards to other writers, I’ve found it easier to get in contact with writers who are best-selling authors, even across the whole of Amazon, in the Spanish language, than it is getting to know the big sellers in English. (Of course, some markets like Amazon Spain or Mexico are smaller, but still…)
4. One never knows when the chance of pure luck might strike. I know a Spanish writer named Enrique Laso, whose books have been translated to many languages and who told me that although he has no idea why, his books translated to Greek have been great hits there. It’s impossible to know what might strike a chord with readers in a particular market.
5. I’ve read many posts by writers talking about how exciting it is to see your first book published and, in the case of paperback, have it in your hands. Well, I must confess seeing one of my books translated to Chinese made me feel equally excited.
6. I know of authors who are working on the idea of publishing their books in bilingual editions and indeed they might provide a good option for marketing as an aid to language learning.

Translation is not a mechanical thing and it requires skills, imagination, a good understanding of both languages, and judgment. There are famous writers who’ve also made a name for themselves as literary translators like Vladimir Nabokov, Jorge Luís Borges and Haruki Murakami. In Canada translators have as big a status as writers and there are awards for translators too.

If you’re interested in translations, there are a number of routes that can be followed. Of course there are translation agencies and freelancers, and you can find translators in places like Fiverr or Upwork. There are also options for splitting the royalties of the final text with the translator, available through places like Babelcube (offering translations to a number of European languages) and Fiberread (translating books to Chinese for split royalties). Although there are the machine translators and also useful online dictionaries, I would not recommend using them for anything more than a few lines (and even then it might be a risk).

I leave you with a few quotes:

Dryden observed that "Translation is a type of drawing after life..."

The British historian Alexander Tytler, in his Essay on the Principles of Translation (1790), emphasized that assiduous reading is a more comprehensive guide to a language than are dictionaries. (And I couldn’t agree more).

Translator from French and Greek, Ignacy Krasicki:

“[T]ranslation... is in fact an art both estimable and very difficult, and therefore is not the labor and portion of common minds; [it] should be [practiced] by those who are themselves capable of being actors, when they see greater use in translating the works of others than in their own works, and hold higher than their own glory the service that they render their country.”

You can check some of the books I’ve translated here.

As my latest story (a suspense/psychological thriller genre novella) is now free, and it’s the prequel of the series I’m working on at the moment, I thought I’d share it with you.

Escaping Psychiatry. Beginnings
How far would a writer go for a killer story? This is the question psychiatrist Mary Miller must answer to solve the first mystery/thriller of her career. You can get to know the main characters of this psychological thriller series for FREE and test your own acumen and intuition in this novella about the price of ambition.

Dr Mary Miller is a young psychiatrist suffering a crisis of vocation. Her friend Phil, a criminalist lawyer working in New York, invites her to visit him and consult on the case of a writer accused of a serious assault. His victim had been harassing him and accusing him of stealing his story, which he’d transformed into a best-selling book. The author denies the allegation and claims it was self-defence. When the victim dies, things get complicated. The threshold between truth and fiction becomes blurred and secrets and lies unfold.

Escaping Psychiatry. Beginnings is the prequel to Escaping Psychiatry a volume collecting three stories where Mary and her psychiatric expertise are called to help in a variety of cases, from religious and race affairs, to the murder of a policeman, and in the last case she gets closer than ever to a serial killer.

You may buy her featured novel, Escaping Psychiatry: Beginnings via:

Amazon | Kobo | Apple | Nook | Page Foundry | Scribd |

Thanks so much to Kim for having me as guest, thanks to all of you for reading, and keep sharing and smiling.

You are quite welcome, Olga! Follow her via:

Newsletter | Website | Blog | Twitter @OlgaNM7 | Facebook | LinkedIn | Goodreads | G+ | Pinterest | Wattpad | Tumblr |


And don't forget to snag your copy of the novella Olga translated for me, El Reto!

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All this month, you are invited to…

— Follow Kim on Twitter
— Follow Kim on Pinterest
— Subscribe to Kim's YouTube channel
— Leave a comment on any page of The Maze, especially if you have done the Twitter, Pinterest, and/or YouTube follow<

… and each action this month is good for one chance to win a copy of any of Kim's e-books.
Please enter often, and good luck!

The Business of Writing: Introduction to Book Translations by @OlgaNM, and EL RETO is #FREE today!

Today I am pleased to welcome author-friend Olga Núñez Miret to talk about translating your books from English to Spanish and vice-versa. 

Olga Author Translator (mailto:mmxrynz at hotmail dot com)
http://eepurl.com/baUcO

Olga translated one of my novellas, The Challenge, into Spanish as EL RETO, which is free worldwide on Kindle today! 

In Olga's words...

First of all thanks to Kim Headlee for inviting me to be a guest of her blog. I know Kim is very keen on exploring new markets for her books and she asked me to talk a bit about translations. So, here it comes.

Translations

What does the word ‘translation’ bring to your mind?

In my case, it always makes me think of a scene in Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation. Bill Murray plays an actor filming a spirits’ advert in Japan (I think it was brandy) and the director is giving him instructions. As he doesn’t understand Japanese, there is an interpreter. The director talks for several minutes, gesticulating, quite intensely. He eventually stops talking and the interpreter just tells him that he wants him to say the lines looking at the camera. ‘Is that all he said?’ Yes, we’re never quite sure.

Of course, that’s interpreting (rendering live and orally a conversation, conference, speech…) whilst translation implies a written piece of work, but there are connections.

It also makes me think of the risks of mistranslating texts. In the case of the Bible mistranslating a Hebrew word and instead of rendering it as ‘beam of light’ it ended up becoming ‘horn’ and we have poor Moses depicted with horns (and not only in Michelangelo’s famous sculpture, that judging by the small size of the horns, makes me think that he wasn’t that convinced about the translation). Oh yes, if you’ve used Google Translate (that seems to be improving, to be fair) you know all about that.

According to Wikipedia: "Translation is the communication of the meaning of a source-language text by means of an equivalent target-language text. While interpreting—the facilitating of oral or sign-language communication between users of different languages—antedates writing; translation began only after the appearance of written literature." The word comes from the Latin translatio ("carrying across" or "bringing across").

Translation results in a great cross-fertilization between languages and new words being incorporated into languages.

These days we have machine translations (like the aforementioned Google Translate; other internet translation services are available) and CAT translations (computer-assisted translations, that involve a human translator aided by a machine that incorporates glossaries, analyses the style of writing and terms favoured by the translator and adapt them to facilitate their task).

Why am I talking about translation?

I’m from Barcelona, in Spain, and moved to the UK in 1992. I trained and worked as a psychiatrist for quite a few years, with gaps to do other things, like studying American Literature (a BA and a PhD). I’d always written in Spain, mostly in Spanish, but the year before I started my American Literature degree (in 1996) I took a creative writing course and started writing fiction in English (I’d written reports, essays, letters before, but mostly to do with my studies in psychiatry), short-stories at first and then longer stuff.

From then on I mostly wrote in English, although that depended on when and where I was writing. One day I rediscovered a story I had written when I was seventeen or eighteen and thought it wasn’t bad but it was a bit too short. I proceeded to translate it to English and then expanded it. Once I finished, I thought it was not right that the story started life in Spanish and now it would only be available in English so I translated it back to Spanish. A few years later, that ended up being the first novel I published, The Man Who Never Was. And once set on my way, I kept translating all my novels and publishing them in both Spanish and English.

A couple of years ago I decided to try something different and part of it involved offering my services translating (from English to Spanish and vice-versa) the works of other authors. It is a very interesting job—an art, some would say—that involves getting to know the texts very closely. I personally find it a very good way to edit and proofread my own books, as I can pick up issues of continuity, consistency, and simple proofreading mistakes I miss whilst reading repeatedly, when I translate.

What skills do translators require? According again to Wikipedia:

• a very good knowledge of the language, written and spoken, from which they are translating (the source language);
• an excellent command of the language into which they are translating (the target language);
• familiarity with the subject matter of the text being translated;
• a profound understanding of the etymological and idiomatic correlates between the two languages; and
• a finely tuned sense of when to metaphrase ("translate literally") and when to paraphrase, so as to assure true rather than spurious equivalents between the source- and target-language texts.

A competent translator is not only bilingual but bicultural. A language is not merely a collection of words and of rules of grammar and syntax for generating sentences, but also a vast interconnecting system of connotations and cultural references whose mastery, writes linguist Mario Pei, "comes close to being a lifetime job."

Olga has so much more to offer on the subject of translations that I plan to publish the rest of her thoughts at a later date!

Meantime, follow Olga via:

Newsletter | Website | Blog | Twitter @OlgaNM7 | Facebook | LinkedIn | Goodreads | G+ | Pinterest | Wattpad | Tumblr |

You may buy her featured novel, Escaping Psychiatry: Beginnings,
the three-story prequel to Escaping Psychiatry via:

Amazon | Kobo | Apple | Nook | Page Foundry | Scribd |

And don't forget to snag your copy of El Reto!

***

All this month, you are invited to…

— Follow Kim on Twitter
— Follow Kim on Pinterest
— Subscribe to Kim's YouTube channel
— Leave a comment on any page of The Maze, especially if you have done the Twitter, Pinterest, and/or YouTube follow<

… and each action this month is good for one chance to win a copy of any of Kim's e-books.

Please enter often, and good luck!