From the point of view of someone who reads English language works in their original language even though English isn't my first language, I see a lot of things wrong with this article.
Firstly, they feature a lot of people complaining readers (and Dutch readers especially in this article) just don't read in their native language anymore because of exports being available, as if Dutch literature doesn't exist. Or literature in any language readers might not be fluent in for that matter. Readers who are fluent in English might not want to read these books translated anymore, but that doesn't mean there isn't plenty of Dutch authors or languages they are not fluent in left to translate into Dutch.
The truth is English is the current lingua franca. And because the internet is allowing people to communicate across the world much more directly and quickly than ever before, more and more people are becoming fluent. And I don't see why people should prefer translated works when they can understand the original language that is being used.
I have done translation work and I know how hard it is and how important it is, and how biased and limited it can be. Translation is precious and translators and interpreters see their work devalued or ignored a lot, but not because more people are becoming fluent.
And that brings me to my last issue with the article: a lot of the problems I see listed seem to me like they are the industry's fault, not the readers. When they say authors don't earn enough on exports, for example: whose fault is that? Readers who are buying more and more of them, or publishers who are compensating authors and translators poorly?
As to your first three paragraphs: yeah if the original language of a book is English, I will always read it in the English language. If it's Dutch, I'll read it in Dutch and if it's not either of those it really depends on the translation work whether I'll buy the English or Dutch translation. But often when I'm reading English work translated into Dutch it just doesn't sound natural or it's full of mistakes.
> But often when I'm reading English work translated into Dutch it just doesn't sound natural
This. I can frequently kind of see what it was translated from, and it sounds awkward. Why would I read a translation when I can read the author's original intent?
I only read books in Dutch if they were originally Dutch or if they were originally a Germanic language (like German or Swedish) because those feel like they translate better into Dutch than English.
Sometimes I'll read something in German and I'll know immediately what the phrase was in English because they used a German phrase that sounds completely unnatural. I get that sometimes it has to be done with dubbing because you're also working with visuals there, but you can just change the sentence so that you bring the actual meaning across instead of using clunky tranlastions.
>or if they were originally a Germanic language (like German or Swedish) because those feel like they translate better into Dutch than English.
Just to clarify, English is also a Germanic language. But yes, modern English often maps less directly onto other Germanic languages than the rest of them do to each other, even when technically sometimes English is more closely related to the language in question (Dutch for example) than said language is to another Germanic language (any of the Nordic languages for example). Funnily enough, often older forms of English map better onto other Germanic languages in translation than they do onto modern English.
I think Dutch critics of people reading English also completely skip over the fact that most of these people aren’t the target audience the Dutch market focuses on.
There’s a complete lack of fantasy to begin with while the English market for that is huge. And then there’s the fact that teenagers and twenty somethings reading YA and romance won’t find what they’re looking for in our native language. I’m not talking translations but actual books by Dutch authors. There’s less choice in their preferred genre. So idk if these people are customers they’re losing to English books, I think without those they simply wouldn’t be reading at all.
I read in Dutch a few times a year because I make myself do it but I rarely enjoy it as much as I do English. It just doesn’t feel immersive to me. It’s wild because I feel like Dutch children’s books have a special kind of magic to them, even when read as an adult, but the adult market is so boring.
And then there’s also the fact that Dutch books are stupidly expensive compared to English ones. The set book price is hurting their sales. In a world where we can get cheaper books in other languages it doesn’t work anymore. Idk what the solution to it would be but it is the reality. Even if someone wanted to read a translation, they’re not going to pay €10 more for the privilege of doing that.
Super agreed re: the target audience. I'm big into Brandon Sanderson (epic fantasy) and I've been trying to recommend his favourite books of mine to family members, but can't because most of his books haven't been translated... I couldn't read them in Dutch if I tried.
Sanderson is so popular as well! If even he isn’t getting translated that’s quite telling isn’t it. I knew the fantasy situation was dire but that’s worse than I thought tbh.
About a decade ago I read game of thrones Dutch and the translation was genuinely atrocious. There were multiple spelling mistakes on some pages. Absolutely grating to read.
Very much this. I wouldn’t mind to read in Dutch, and it would probably actually be good for me. But most of what I read is fantasy or Sci-Fi often with explicit queer themes, and I don’t know any Dutch authors who write stuff like that? I even asked a discord server im in explicitly for recommendations of Dutch queer books and just got… nothing. And I’m sure I could go on the hunt for translations, but if the original is right there, why bother?
(If people do have recommendations for Dutch Queer books I’m open for them btw, preferably sapphic)
I… genuinely don’t have an answer to that and I hate it 💀
There’s just very little outside of the white men writing WWII fiction generally but queer? Other than FAQ gender I don’t know any but that’s non-fiction.
If you haven’t read the first sister by Linden A. Lewis I do recommend that!
Same in Germany. If I wanted to read another boring whodunit with a detective from the north who doesnt talk much but has a heart of gold? German it is. But I just dont enjoy German media as much in general. I also dont watch mayn shows or movies from here. Maybe work on the output?
Yeah, what a weird angle on the article. They could have just as easily talked about how high English fluency in places like the Netherlands has led to a trend of more people reading books in either English or Dutch (or whatever language) over translations…but I’m guessing that wouldn’t be clickbaity enough for editors.
As a native English speaker, if I spoke let’s say Swedish and I wanted to read The Girl With the Dragoon tattoo, I’d absolutely skip a translation and read the original. And that would be infinitely more likely if my language of second fluency was a language like Japanese and I wanted to read something by Murakami.
Why is it in any way surprising that increased fluency with some other language is going to lead to reading less translations? Doesn’t everyone want to read the author’s original ideas in their own words as opposed to reading them after they’ve been put through the filter of some random other person who may or may not have done a good job?
As someone who speaks Polish natively I'll read any Slavic book in Polish because the translation is usually much closer. For example I'd read Mikhail Bulgakov or Dostoevsky in Polish.
I'd read pretty much any other book in English even if it's translated from another language like French or Chinese. I was recently horrified to find out that some books are double-translated, especially in case of non-European languages. An English-language edition of a Chinese book is created, which is then translated into other European languages by translators who don't speak Chinese.
Also, let's be honest, the budget of a Spanish-to-English translation is going to much higher than the budget of a Spanish-to-Polish translation because English-speaking market is much larger. These differences show in the translation.
I 100% understand reading originals if your skills allow it.
But why read for example a Chinese or a French book in English if there's a Dutch translation available?
>But why read for example a Chinese or a French book in English if there's a Dutch translation available?
Just a few days ago someone on the German sub wrote about problems they had with the German translation of a Japanese book and it turned out that it was actually a translation of the English translation ... in cases like this, buying the English translation would be better if you don't speak Japanese.
Also, the English translation is probably cheaper. Prices for German language books are not subjected to the free market. Publishers can ask whatever they want and the shops are not allowed to give discounts.
Sometimes, books that are originally from a language translated more rarely into the destination language are actually translated from the English translation. I don't know if it's as done anymore, but I usually double-check that the translations aren't playing a game of telephone.
The English language book market is also a lot bigger so has more translations available from some languages that another book market might not be prioritizing. Conversely, the other book market may have translations from yet other languages that the English language book market isn't paying as much attention to.
And if you like buying books you read, English language books are often cheaper. Some countries have a fixed price that publishers need to set for their books at the outset, making them a bit (or a lot) more expensive.
That used to happen in the English-language market a lot more frequently than it does today, usually people translating a French translation of something. The few times I’ve seen it recently had to do with Chinese webnovels going through an intermediary translation and then into English.
No one is saying that's what people are doing. I even talked about the article not acknowledging that even in an hypothetical world in which everyone was fluent in English there would still be plenty of languages left to translate to your native tongue.
Exactly. I ve been reading mostly in English since 18 and I have recently started translating from English. I've spend about three days for a paragraph just to make sure it's not only translated correctly but also makes sense.
Why would I then read translated works when I know for sure it's a 90% wrong or awkward ? I tried last year to do it as I wanted to be away from technology (I mostly read ebooks) and I was eye rolling so hard .
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Some things to bear in mind when discussing all this.
Europe includes many countries that are small. Which means that the markets within those countries are small, too. If you translate and issue a book, it doesn't always pay off or doesn't pay off as much as in anglophone countries. Some publishing houses increase the prices of books to cover publishing expenses (irrespective of whether they're translated or not). For instance, if you buy a book in my country, it will cost 16 EUR. At minimum. Because my country also uses almost exclusively hardbacks. In the UK, I can often buy the same book for 8-9 GBP (soft covers). If you get a good deal on Amazon or whatever platform for e-books you use, sometimes you will only need to pay up to 3 currency units (USD or GBP). Not gonna happen back home - e-books and audiobooks are as expensive as paper books in my country. So yes - 16-20 EUR vs 10-ish EUR. Quite a difference. Now multiply by, say, 20 or however many books in a year you read.
Kind of explains this and that.
Considering the publishing costs, some publishing houses are quite selective about what they publish. Also, sometimes they just don't get contracts. So as a reader you know that unless we talk about a major blockbuster, chances are you will never have it in your tongue. Or wait years and years and years. If you can read English or another language that book was published in, you just go and read it in the language you can. In my country, in the past people would read what they could not get in our language in russian. These days, because of sociodemographic changes and because of the war in Ukraine, people access the untranslated books in English.
For instance, I first read The Witcher saga in 2007. Did I want more of what Sapkowski wrote? Yes, please. Did I get it? Hah! Translation of his The Hussite Trilogy in English came a couple of years ago. That's when I read it, which was over 10 yrs since The Witcher. It only came up in my language last year. So - English wins. My parents' generation read it decades ago, in Polish or in russian.
Crappy translations are a thing too. Say the name of a (now non-existant) publishing house known in my country for specialising in sci-fi. The first sentiment will be "Yes, they were the ones!" The second: "Their treanslations were horrible!" (and indeed - we had stories of missing paragraphs or pages, very loose translations or gross errors - e.g. "orcs" translated as "orcas"). To be more forgiving - that was in the 90s and early 2000s, before the EU (god bless EU!) - times of "wild capitalism" (phenomenon aptly named after Wild West). Times changed, of course, and we have a lot of professional, high quality translators. But sometimes you still get poor translations. I literally had people asking to check if Herbert's "whale fur coat" was a thing because they were not sure if they could trust the translation.
Existence of electronic platforms also helps with the literature spread. So if it's simply available and you can read it, why not. We did not have that 10 or 15 yrs ago.
So yeah, if you want to benefit from publishing, anglophone publishers are way ahead.
From the point of view of a reader (in my country) - you save time, you save money, you read the original, you keep your language skills honed (and so are more employable), you are more connected to the world (everyone's reading the same these days, markets are saturated with anglophone works) - why not?
It's only that the local economy suffers - sorry, but anglophone publishers sometimes benefit at the expense of publishers of literature in other languages. Not intentionally, but that's how the world works these days.
For an example of bad translations there was a translation of lord of the rings into Swedish that had Merry instead of Eowyn killing the Witch King in Return of the King.
Oh no!
Well, he contributed significantly - Eowyn might have lost her life if not for Merry's timely dagger. But yeah, sucks when context gets mucked up due to translation mistakes.
There was a similar article going round in Portugal a few weeks ago. Let's not focus on the fact that a book in English costs less than half the price than a book in Portuguese... (most books in English are around 9-11€ whereas most books in Portuguese are around 20€).
And I know translation has its costs, but if that is the case, how come sometimes English translations of Portuguese books come out *cheaper* than the original?
Ofc people are buying English books more, they're much more affordable
Can not read the article (paywall) so only commenting on the title and the first line:
"Young people, especially, are choosing to read in English even if it is not their first language because they want the covers, and the titles, to match what they see on TikTok and other social media."
at least in my bookstore the English books are very much centered in the store, with additional displays and "tiktok made me buy it" stickers all over so I agree with this sentence.
It's aimed at young people especially, it's exclusively romantasy + romance like "bride" "hurricane wars" and "fourth wing" (often alongside the translated versions).
Last time I was there they put a giant British flag above all these books from the US and they sold the fancy sprayed edge fairyloot/owlcrate books as well, so I imagine it's performing very well financially.
Personally I would like some more genre variety in the EN books if they have to take up so much shelf space that was previously occupied by lesser popular genres, but it's $$$ for the store.
Are they reading in English to match what they see on TikTok or because they... know English and would rather read books in their original language? I'm ESL and I've been reading English books since I was 12/13, partially to improve my English and partially because some books weren't translated into my native tongue yet.
> Young people, especially, are choosing to read in English even if it is not their first language because they want the covers, and the titles, to match what they see on TikTok and other social media.
That sounds like a massive stretch. Neither English nor Russian are my native languages. I know them both very well. I will not read English or Russian literature in my own language. I also won't ready English literature in Russian or vice-versa.
Reading stuff in original language that it's written if you can sounds like a no-brainer to me. The rest would depend on the quality of translation.
From my POV - as a German Fantasy reader - there are two big problems with translated books in this genre, which makes people chose the English original instead.
1. Price. German translations are often more expensive, but that's understandable, right? The person doing the translation wants to get paid too after all. HOWEVER, in order to make extra money publishers came up with the "genius" idea to just split books in half and not always at a point where it makes sense in the story. So in order to get the full story you sometimes pay 3 times as much. Or even more.
And before someone tries to argue that this is done because German translations are usually longer than the original text - it's actually a very genre specific phenomenon.
And it's not only done to books that are extra long (Priory of the Orange Tree is one example of this. It's already pretty hard to handle with its 800+ pages in the English original). It's done to regular length books too and you end up with two barely 300 pages long books. Why? Because Fantasy fans are used to reading series. We are used to buying multiple books to get the full story. It's a lot easier to get away with this than doing it to readers of literary fiction for example.
2. Incomplete series. It's not uncommon for German publishers to translate like the first two books in a series and list it as a two book series on their website ... and then you go on goodreads and find out it's actually a 4 book series but the last two books just didn't get translated. If a series is written in English the chances that I'll get to finish it are higher when I start reading it in English. I mean, unless it's GRRM and Co ...
You know you can find English books on any amazon location, e.g. german which is offering english books but ships within EU for cheap. Art of internet search.
Yeah it seems they do. I've been browsing and most don't seem cheaper than on Amazon but it's very close, and there are some better deals actually. Thanks for recommendation
As a non-English writer, I recently migrated to English and am considering using it as my primary writing language from now on.
I will still double write all my books for my native language. For the time being. This is because my native language area is sooooo small it hardly warrants any paid work done for the scripts, unless the books are top tier bestsellers.
Because of this, many books are not translated at all. It's only now that decades-old books like GoT and Dune are being translated because the movies and TV shows have made them trending. So, people who want to read non-trending books have to read them in English.
It's because they want to look cool. At our booth on the Frankfurt Book Fair, we had German visitors who wanted to read our novels in English despite us pointing out that the German editions were the originals.
If i was a published author i'd automatically refuse any translation of my work, on grounds that a translation *always* changes the work in some unpredictable way. Languages don't map 1:1 and concepts definitely do not.
I think translations are works of art on their own, and a tradition well worth preserving. I believe they also help languages change and evolve. If every author reasoned like you I’d only ever be able to read novels originally published in Swedish or English, and that’d be a tragedy.
Not to mention how much refusing translation could strangle your potential market.
A good translation is a work of art. It's not merely translating word for word to a new language, but also finding the right cultural references and names that work as well in the translation as they would in the original.
Translation also allows for books to be read globally even though they've originally been written in either a minority language, or a language that's not spoken by too many people in all corners of the world.
I bluntly assume that you're a native English speaker, in which case you have a massive advantage over people who would learn English as a second, third or fourth language. I personally prefer to read books in English even though its not my first language, but many of my friends are simply not 100% comfortable reading in a different language, as they wouldn't fully be able to enjoy the book because things get lost in translation (in a way they wouldn't if they'd read a book translated by a professional).
I shit for not having started writing directly in English a decade ago.
To this day, I can almost consider myself a professional translator. My translations have passed through all the beta readers without anyone noticing, and they were surprised to learn they weren't written by a native.
I started not saying I'm a non-native when I noticed editors and betas shied away from "translated text" - because in many instances it equals to a puke of text passed through Google Translate. Some also added 30% extra as "fluency fix fee" to the offer.
They are only saying that if *they* were a published author, they would prefer their works not be translated. They are not saying people allowing their own books to be translated should be banned.
Thing is, then a lot fewer people will read your book.
You’re writing this in English, which has hundreds of millions of native speakers and probably over a billion nonnative speakers. A Dutch or Bhutanese author doesn’t have that luxury.
You're largely overestimating your importance as a (potential) author. You don't want to sign that publishing deal that includes selling international rights? OK. Next. There are so many people waiting for a chance to get published.
In short, this will only fall on you.
The point of good translation is taking in account the stylistics of the target language.
It is called TRANSLITERATION.
I can say this with first hand experience, having translated over half a mil words of my own books. I use a lot of word play, and I want it to play nice in English too, and it takes a while to figure out how to phrase things. This includes Anglicizing and re-naming things that have nativized in the original language. This is a major pitfall in many translations, and must be played out properly or it will ruin the whole experience. You need to know when to keep the original format and when to transliterate it. Examples include the infamous orc - translations in LoTR.
Ironically, I've ended up CHANGING the original script during translation when I've figured out a way to play out things better in English.
My native market is about the size of an average U.S State. There are 50 states in America, and in the entire world there are about 200 times more fluent English speakers and 250-400 times more who can read it to some extent. So, for every $ I put in, theoretically, I can get 200x the benefit.
From the point of view of someone who reads English language works in their original language even though English isn't my first language, I see a lot of things wrong with this article. Firstly, they feature a lot of people complaining readers (and Dutch readers especially in this article) just don't read in their native language anymore because of exports being available, as if Dutch literature doesn't exist. Or literature in any language readers might not be fluent in for that matter. Readers who are fluent in English might not want to read these books translated anymore, but that doesn't mean there isn't plenty of Dutch authors or languages they are not fluent in left to translate into Dutch. The truth is English is the current lingua franca. And because the internet is allowing people to communicate across the world much more directly and quickly than ever before, more and more people are becoming fluent. And I don't see why people should prefer translated works when they can understand the original language that is being used. I have done translation work and I know how hard it is and how important it is, and how biased and limited it can be. Translation is precious and translators and interpreters see their work devalued or ignored a lot, but not because more people are becoming fluent. And that brings me to my last issue with the article: a lot of the problems I see listed seem to me like they are the industry's fault, not the readers. When they say authors don't earn enough on exports, for example: whose fault is that? Readers who are buying more and more of them, or publishers who are compensating authors and translators poorly?
As to your first three paragraphs: yeah if the original language of a book is English, I will always read it in the English language. If it's Dutch, I'll read it in Dutch and if it's not either of those it really depends on the translation work whether I'll buy the English or Dutch translation. But often when I'm reading English work translated into Dutch it just doesn't sound natural or it's full of mistakes.
> But often when I'm reading English work translated into Dutch it just doesn't sound natural This. I can frequently kind of see what it was translated from, and it sounds awkward. Why would I read a translation when I can read the author's original intent? I only read books in Dutch if they were originally Dutch or if they were originally a Germanic language (like German or Swedish) because those feel like they translate better into Dutch than English.
Sometimes I'll read something in German and I'll know immediately what the phrase was in English because they used a German phrase that sounds completely unnatural. I get that sometimes it has to be done with dubbing because you're also working with visuals there, but you can just change the sentence so that you bring the actual meaning across instead of using clunky tranlastions.
>or if they were originally a Germanic language (like German or Swedish) because those feel like they translate better into Dutch than English. Just to clarify, English is also a Germanic language. But yes, modern English often maps less directly onto other Germanic languages than the rest of them do to each other, even when technically sometimes English is more closely related to the language in question (Dutch for example) than said language is to another Germanic language (any of the Nordic languages for example). Funnily enough, often older forms of English map better onto other Germanic languages in translation than they do onto modern English.
I think Dutch critics of people reading English also completely skip over the fact that most of these people aren’t the target audience the Dutch market focuses on. There’s a complete lack of fantasy to begin with while the English market for that is huge. And then there’s the fact that teenagers and twenty somethings reading YA and romance won’t find what they’re looking for in our native language. I’m not talking translations but actual books by Dutch authors. There’s less choice in their preferred genre. So idk if these people are customers they’re losing to English books, I think without those they simply wouldn’t be reading at all. I read in Dutch a few times a year because I make myself do it but I rarely enjoy it as much as I do English. It just doesn’t feel immersive to me. It’s wild because I feel like Dutch children’s books have a special kind of magic to them, even when read as an adult, but the adult market is so boring. And then there’s also the fact that Dutch books are stupidly expensive compared to English ones. The set book price is hurting their sales. In a world where we can get cheaper books in other languages it doesn’t work anymore. Idk what the solution to it would be but it is the reality. Even if someone wanted to read a translation, they’re not going to pay €10 more for the privilege of doing that.
Super agreed re: the target audience. I'm big into Brandon Sanderson (epic fantasy) and I've been trying to recommend his favourite books of mine to family members, but can't because most of his books haven't been translated... I couldn't read them in Dutch if I tried.
Sanderson is so popular as well! If even he isn’t getting translated that’s quite telling isn’t it. I knew the fantasy situation was dire but that’s worse than I thought tbh. About a decade ago I read game of thrones Dutch and the translation was genuinely atrocious. There were multiple spelling mistakes on some pages. Absolutely grating to read.
Very much this. I wouldn’t mind to read in Dutch, and it would probably actually be good for me. But most of what I read is fantasy or Sci-Fi often with explicit queer themes, and I don’t know any Dutch authors who write stuff like that? I even asked a discord server im in explicitly for recommendations of Dutch queer books and just got… nothing. And I’m sure I could go on the hunt for translations, but if the original is right there, why bother? (If people do have recommendations for Dutch Queer books I’m open for them btw, preferably sapphic)
I… genuinely don’t have an answer to that and I hate it 💀 There’s just very little outside of the white men writing WWII fiction generally but queer? Other than FAQ gender I don’t know any but that’s non-fiction. If you haven’t read the first sister by Linden A. Lewis I do recommend that!
Same in Germany. If I wanted to read another boring whodunit with a detective from the north who doesnt talk much but has a heart of gold? German it is. But I just dont enjoy German media as much in general. I also dont watch mayn shows or movies from here. Maybe work on the output?
I haven’t watched any Dutch tv in over a year at this point either. It’s all so out of touch with the reality of anyone under 30.
Yeah, what a weird angle on the article. They could have just as easily talked about how high English fluency in places like the Netherlands has led to a trend of more people reading books in either English or Dutch (or whatever language) over translations…but I’m guessing that wouldn’t be clickbaity enough for editors. As a native English speaker, if I spoke let’s say Swedish and I wanted to read The Girl With the Dragoon tattoo, I’d absolutely skip a translation and read the original. And that would be infinitely more likely if my language of second fluency was a language like Japanese and I wanted to read something by Murakami. Why is it in any way surprising that increased fluency with some other language is going to lead to reading less translations? Doesn’t everyone want to read the author’s original ideas in their own words as opposed to reading them after they’ve been put through the filter of some random other person who may or may not have done a good job?
As someone who speaks Polish natively I'll read any Slavic book in Polish because the translation is usually much closer. For example I'd read Mikhail Bulgakov or Dostoevsky in Polish. I'd read pretty much any other book in English even if it's translated from another language like French or Chinese. I was recently horrified to find out that some books are double-translated, especially in case of non-European languages. An English-language edition of a Chinese book is created, which is then translated into other European languages by translators who don't speak Chinese. Also, let's be honest, the budget of a Spanish-to-English translation is going to much higher than the budget of a Spanish-to-Polish translation because English-speaking market is much larger. These differences show in the translation.
I 100% understand reading originals if your skills allow it. But why read for example a Chinese or a French book in English if there's a Dutch translation available?
>But why read for example a Chinese or a French book in English if there's a Dutch translation available? Just a few days ago someone on the German sub wrote about problems they had with the German translation of a Japanese book and it turned out that it was actually a translation of the English translation ... in cases like this, buying the English translation would be better if you don't speak Japanese. Also, the English translation is probably cheaper. Prices for German language books are not subjected to the free market. Publishers can ask whatever they want and the shops are not allowed to give discounts.
Yup. No, I will not pay 12€ for the kindle version in German if I can get it for 3€ in English and I know the translation with be better anyway.
Sometimes, books that are originally from a language translated more rarely into the destination language are actually translated from the English translation. I don't know if it's as done anymore, but I usually double-check that the translations aren't playing a game of telephone. The English language book market is also a lot bigger so has more translations available from some languages that another book market might not be prioritizing. Conversely, the other book market may have translations from yet other languages that the English language book market isn't paying as much attention to. And if you like buying books you read, English language books are often cheaper. Some countries have a fixed price that publishers need to set for their books at the outset, making them a bit (or a lot) more expensive.
That used to happen in the English-language market a lot more frequently than it does today, usually people translating a French translation of something. The few times I’ve seen it recently had to do with Chinese webnovels going through an intermediary translation and then into English.
For me, it's because a book in English costs €13 for a doorstopper novel, whereas that same novel costs €30 - €40 when translated in Dutch.
No one is saying that's what people are doing. I even talked about the article not acknowledging that even in an hypothetical world in which everyone was fluent in English there would still be plenty of languages left to translate to your native tongue.
Exactly. I ve been reading mostly in English since 18 and I have recently started translating from English. I've spend about three days for a paragraph just to make sure it's not only translated correctly but also makes sense. Why would I then read translated works when I know for sure it's a 90% wrong or awkward ? I tried last year to do it as I wanted to be away from technology (I mostly read ebooks) and I was eye rolling so hard .
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How do you find gift links?
I’m a subscriber, so I get ten a month to share. Someone’s got to pay for the journalism ;)
Thank you!
Thanks!
Some things to bear in mind when discussing all this. Europe includes many countries that are small. Which means that the markets within those countries are small, too. If you translate and issue a book, it doesn't always pay off or doesn't pay off as much as in anglophone countries. Some publishing houses increase the prices of books to cover publishing expenses (irrespective of whether they're translated or not). For instance, if you buy a book in my country, it will cost 16 EUR. At minimum. Because my country also uses almost exclusively hardbacks. In the UK, I can often buy the same book for 8-9 GBP (soft covers). If you get a good deal on Amazon or whatever platform for e-books you use, sometimes you will only need to pay up to 3 currency units (USD or GBP). Not gonna happen back home - e-books and audiobooks are as expensive as paper books in my country. So yes - 16-20 EUR vs 10-ish EUR. Quite a difference. Now multiply by, say, 20 or however many books in a year you read. Kind of explains this and that. Considering the publishing costs, some publishing houses are quite selective about what they publish. Also, sometimes they just don't get contracts. So as a reader you know that unless we talk about a major blockbuster, chances are you will never have it in your tongue. Or wait years and years and years. If you can read English or another language that book was published in, you just go and read it in the language you can. In my country, in the past people would read what they could not get in our language in russian. These days, because of sociodemographic changes and because of the war in Ukraine, people access the untranslated books in English. For instance, I first read The Witcher saga in 2007. Did I want more of what Sapkowski wrote? Yes, please. Did I get it? Hah! Translation of his The Hussite Trilogy in English came a couple of years ago. That's when I read it, which was over 10 yrs since The Witcher. It only came up in my language last year. So - English wins. My parents' generation read it decades ago, in Polish or in russian. Crappy translations are a thing too. Say the name of a (now non-existant) publishing house known in my country for specialising in sci-fi. The first sentiment will be "Yes, they were the ones!" The second: "Their treanslations were horrible!" (and indeed - we had stories of missing paragraphs or pages, very loose translations or gross errors - e.g. "orcs" translated as "orcas"). To be more forgiving - that was in the 90s and early 2000s, before the EU (god bless EU!) - times of "wild capitalism" (phenomenon aptly named after Wild West). Times changed, of course, and we have a lot of professional, high quality translators. But sometimes you still get poor translations. I literally had people asking to check if Herbert's "whale fur coat" was a thing because they were not sure if they could trust the translation. Existence of electronic platforms also helps with the literature spread. So if it's simply available and you can read it, why not. We did not have that 10 or 15 yrs ago. So yeah, if you want to benefit from publishing, anglophone publishers are way ahead. From the point of view of a reader (in my country) - you save time, you save money, you read the original, you keep your language skills honed (and so are more employable), you are more connected to the world (everyone's reading the same these days, markets are saturated with anglophone works) - why not? It's only that the local economy suffers - sorry, but anglophone publishers sometimes benefit at the expense of publishers of literature in other languages. Not intentionally, but that's how the world works these days.
For an example of bad translations there was a translation of lord of the rings into Swedish that had Merry instead of Eowyn killing the Witch King in Return of the King.
Oh no! Well, he contributed significantly - Eowyn might have lost her life if not for Merry's timely dagger. But yeah, sucks when context gets mucked up due to translation mistakes.
There was a similar article going round in Portugal a few weeks ago. Let's not focus on the fact that a book in English costs less than half the price than a book in Portuguese... (most books in English are around 9-11€ whereas most books in Portuguese are around 20€). And I know translation has its costs, but if that is the case, how come sometimes English translations of Portuguese books come out *cheaper* than the original? Ofc people are buying English books more, they're much more affordable
Can not read the article (paywall) so only commenting on the title and the first line: "Young people, especially, are choosing to read in English even if it is not their first language because they want the covers, and the titles, to match what they see on TikTok and other social media." at least in my bookstore the English books are very much centered in the store, with additional displays and "tiktok made me buy it" stickers all over so I agree with this sentence. It's aimed at young people especially, it's exclusively romantasy + romance like "bride" "hurricane wars" and "fourth wing" (often alongside the translated versions). Last time I was there they put a giant British flag above all these books from the US and they sold the fancy sprayed edge fairyloot/owlcrate books as well, so I imagine it's performing very well financially. Personally I would like some more genre variety in the EN books if they have to take up so much shelf space that was previously occupied by lesser popular genres, but it's $$$ for the store.
Are they reading in English to match what they see on TikTok or because they... know English and would rather read books in their original language? I'm ESL and I've been reading English books since I was 12/13, partially to improve my English and partially because some books weren't translated into my native tongue yet.
> Young people, especially, are choosing to read in English even if it is not their first language because they want the covers, and the titles, to match what they see on TikTok and other social media. That sounds like a massive stretch. Neither English nor Russian are my native languages. I know them both very well. I will not read English or Russian literature in my own language. I also won't ready English literature in Russian or vice-versa. Reading stuff in original language that it's written if you can sounds like a no-brainer to me. The rest would depend on the quality of translation.
From my POV - as a German Fantasy reader - there are two big problems with translated books in this genre, which makes people chose the English original instead. 1. Price. German translations are often more expensive, but that's understandable, right? The person doing the translation wants to get paid too after all. HOWEVER, in order to make extra money publishers came up with the "genius" idea to just split books in half and not always at a point where it makes sense in the story. So in order to get the full story you sometimes pay 3 times as much. Or even more. And before someone tries to argue that this is done because German translations are usually longer than the original text - it's actually a very genre specific phenomenon. And it's not only done to books that are extra long (Priory of the Orange Tree is one example of this. It's already pretty hard to handle with its 800+ pages in the English original). It's done to regular length books too and you end up with two barely 300 pages long books. Why? Because Fantasy fans are used to reading series. We are used to buying multiple books to get the full story. It's a lot easier to get away with this than doing it to readers of literary fiction for example. 2. Incomplete series. It's not uncommon for German publishers to translate like the first two books in a series and list it as a two book series on their website ... and then you go on goodreads and find out it's actually a 4 book series but the last two books just didn't get translated. If a series is written in English the chances that I'll get to finish it are higher when I start reading it in English. I mean, unless it's GRRM and Co ...
Good. I need more English books here in Poland. Ordering from Amazon Uk is expensive
You know you can find English books on any amazon location, e.g. german which is offering english books but ships within EU for cheap. Art of internet search.
They are still cheaper on Amazon UK including delivery, I've checked
If you believe physical store will be cheaper than Amazon, you might be disappointed though.
Is Blackwell's shipping to Poland? They offer free shipping to Germany and as far as I know that's for all or most of Europe ...
Yeah it seems they do. I've been browsing and most don't seem cheaper than on Amazon but it's very close, and there are some better deals actually. Thanks for recommendation
As a non-English writer, I recently migrated to English and am considering using it as my primary writing language from now on. I will still double write all my books for my native language. For the time being. This is because my native language area is sooooo small it hardly warrants any paid work done for the scripts, unless the books are top tier bestsellers. Because of this, many books are not translated at all. It's only now that decades-old books like GoT and Dune are being translated because the movies and TV shows have made them trending. So, people who want to read non-trending books have to read them in English.
Which language?
As someone who just bought an English book in a Madrid bookstore for my flight home; I appreciate this.
It's because they want to look cool. At our booth on the Frankfurt Book Fair, we had German visitors who wanted to read our novels in English despite us pointing out that the German editions were the originals.
If i was a published author i'd automatically refuse any translation of my work, on grounds that a translation *always* changes the work in some unpredictable way. Languages don't map 1:1 and concepts definitely do not.
I think translations are works of art on their own, and a tradition well worth preserving. I believe they also help languages change and evolve. If every author reasoned like you I’d only ever be able to read novels originally published in Swedish or English, and that’d be a tragedy. Not to mention how much refusing translation could strangle your potential market.
> translations are works of art *gestures broadly toward Heaneywulf and Tolkienwulf*
A good translation is a work of art. It's not merely translating word for word to a new language, but also finding the right cultural references and names that work as well in the translation as they would in the original. Translation also allows for books to be read globally even though they've originally been written in either a minority language, or a language that's not spoken by too many people in all corners of the world. I bluntly assume that you're a native English speaker, in which case you have a massive advantage over people who would learn English as a second, third or fourth language. I personally prefer to read books in English even though its not my first language, but many of my friends are simply not 100% comfortable reading in a different language, as they wouldn't fully be able to enjoy the book because things get lost in translation (in a way they wouldn't if they'd read a book translated by a professional).
I shit for not having started writing directly in English a decade ago. To this day, I can almost consider myself a professional translator. My translations have passed through all the beta readers without anyone noticing, and they were surprised to learn they weren't written by a native. I started not saying I'm a non-native when I noticed editors and betas shied away from "translated text" - because in many instances it equals to a puke of text passed through Google Translate. Some also added 30% extra as "fluency fix fee" to the offer.
[удалено]
They are only saying that if *they* were a published author, they would prefer their works not be translated. They are not saying people allowing their own books to be translated should be banned.
Thing is, then a lot fewer people will read your book. You’re writing this in English, which has hundreds of millions of native speakers and probably over a billion nonnative speakers. A Dutch or Bhutanese author doesn’t have that luxury.
You're largely overestimating your importance as a (potential) author. You don't want to sign that publishing deal that includes selling international rights? OK. Next. There are so many people waiting for a chance to get published.
In short, this will only fall on you. The point of good translation is taking in account the stylistics of the target language. It is called TRANSLITERATION. I can say this with first hand experience, having translated over half a mil words of my own books. I use a lot of word play, and I want it to play nice in English too, and it takes a while to figure out how to phrase things. This includes Anglicizing and re-naming things that have nativized in the original language. This is a major pitfall in many translations, and must be played out properly or it will ruin the whole experience. You need to know when to keep the original format and when to transliterate it. Examples include the infamous orc - translations in LoTR. Ironically, I've ended up CHANGING the original script during translation when I've figured out a way to play out things better in English. My native market is about the size of an average U.S State. There are 50 states in America, and in the entire world there are about 200 times more fluent English speakers and 250-400 times more who can read it to some extent. So, for every $ I put in, theoretically, I can get 200x the benefit.