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Educational snobbery…
First, I would like to set out my credentials to the translators and narrators reading this article.
I have been writing for many years, but before that, I was a translator of six languages into English. Then audiobooks began to take off in about 2018, but I am a little dyslexic, and so am a hesitant, unreliable reader.
However, I have written 175 books, and I got into translating them quite quickly. So, to sum up, I have about 800 publications in forty languages as I am writing this piece.
Translators and Narrators
I am indebted to many translators and narrators for getting us to this point. For I truly believe that big things can only come from co-operation.
Having said that, very few of those translators and narrators have earned enough to draw a payment from the publishers It saddens me greatly, and this is the point of this article.
Why is that?
After years of thought on the matter, I am convinced that it has to do with out-dated, old-fashioned snobbery. Sorry, guys, but in the good old days, translators and narrators went to university, got a good job, performed it and earned their money per job or per week. They had a status.
However, nowadays, a lot of these guys are out of a job, and are taking gigs translating and narrating books privately. All well and good, but who is going to sell these books?
Previously, it did not concern them. That was the client’s responsibility.
Sales and Marketing
The translators and narrators have no experience. In fact, in many societies, selling is considered menial. It is not something that a university graduates think they should have to stoop to.
My point is that those days have gone!
Many translators and narrators rely on the author to sell their product, but talking from my own experience, I don’t know anyone in most of the languages that my books exist in.
I may know two or three Arabs, a couple of Hindus, a few Spanish people, a Dutchman and a German, but I can’t sell enough books to that little lot to keep a hundred people going! Not with the best will I the world.
The only people who do know enough are the translators and narrators!
They have to sell the books or no books get sold!
Having said that, the author has to provide all the marketing material and support necessary to enable success, and translators and narrators have to climb down from their high horses and accept that the world has changed, and that sales and marketing are not dirty words.
The strength of this blog, Megan Publishing Services, is the number of other languages that my books are in on it. At least, that’s one of the ways that I see it. I have written fifty-odd novels and about a hundred and twenty-five other books, and people I have never met from lands far and wide have wanted to translate them. This represents a colossal amount of work, effort and collaboration from people right around the globe. I live in Thailand, but I have worked with narrators from Canada to Australia, Europe and the Americas. Then there are translators living from Peru to Mongolia, and most countries in between including all the larger European languages and several Asian and African ones too from Afrikaans to Russian.
At the time of writing, there are about seven hundred translations and narrations in about thirty-five other languages on the Megan Publishing Services blog.
Other Languages
Today, I added books translated into eight more languages new to the blog, namely: Czech, Chinese, Hungarian, Macedonian, Slovak, Telugu, Turkish and Urdu.
And I have more to add. Off the top of my head, I can say that I need to add: Hauza, Igbo, Mongolian, Northern and Southern Soto, and Zulu.
Sadly, no one has offered to translate a book into my own language, Welsh, yet. I’m working on it though. To clarify, I come from Wales, but write in English.
When I have posted a page for all of the other languages that my books exist in, I will add links to each of the books and, possibly, the translators and narrators, so that readers and listeners can get to know the better. I hope that we can help them along in their careers.
Support Narrators and Translators
So,if you are not a native English-speaker, please, follow the link below to see whether I have anything in your language, and know that if you actually buy a book, you will be encouraging the narrators, translators and me to keep this project going.
Thanks to all who have contributed foreign translations, and to all of you who have bought them!
The link to the list of other languages covered so far is: Languages on MPS
People come to translating books and documents for many reasons. The owner of the book or document may want to sell it to, or just have it read by, more people, but the reasons why translators do it are even more varied. There are three main groups: 1] a foreign language student may just want more practice in his or her second language; 2] young professionals in translation agencies may want to add the fact that they have translated a foreign book to their curriculum vitae; and 3] others may be looking to earn some extra money or even their whole livelihood from translation services. This last group may include freelance stay-at-home parents, the disabled, the retired, the long-term sick, avid readers or just anyone with the skill and too much free time on their hands.
Translators
From the professional writer’s perspective, from my perspective to be more accurate, all of these are valid reasons coming into the international market of literary translation. However, while I would accept collaboration from the first two groups, it is the third one that most interests me.
Why? Well, the first two groups tend to feel that they have accomplished their mission when they have finished the job, and I, the author, am then left to promote the book to the public alone. I would much prefer to have my international band of translators as partners, so that we both benefit from each others’ promotional efforts. In fact, the translator invariably receives the lion’s share of the royalties at least for the first few years. For example, at Babelcube this is 50% and at Tektime a whopping 75%!!
Scam Translators
Naturally, the work must be of a high standard and carried out by a human. It is not that I am against translation tools, but something pushed through a machine like Google Translate chunk by chunk will not pass the grade, and will not sell. Readers might buy it, and it will probably fool the author who might not speak foreign languages, but the reader will soon realise that he has been duped and will return the publication for a refund. The result will be that the writer is stuck with a book that won’t sell, and the translator has wasted his or her time completely. It has happened to me at least once, and is particularly annoying because the work is done under a legally binding contract, so the author may not have other translations made in that language.
As I said above, the best collaboration comes from those who want to make money from their work, so, why do so few translated novels sell well? In my experience, this stems from a lack of understanding of, and possibly, experience in, marketing, sales, and even the Internet.
Sales
I am not including myself here, as I have eight years’ experience selling my now four hundred publications, but many authors and translators do not. They seem to think that their masterpieces will sell themselves, but this is simply not true, as 99% of them soon discover. Most writers will keep on writing regardless, but most translators will give up on translating books as a worthless cause.
It doesn’t have to be like that though. Both parties need to realise that writing is not the business they are in, they have become booksellers in a very small niche market of the author’s name and genre. Of course, the writer is stuck with that, but the literary translator can diversify into many authors and genres in order to spread the risk – in the same way that an investor does with stocks and shares. The comparison is an apt one. The author is the CEO of one company – Himself PLC – while the literary translator is a shareholder in many.
Earnings
Let’s say that a dedicated, part-time literary translator can translate one book a month, and earns $5 a month from its sale. After twelve months, that makes $60 p/m per book or $720 p/a for all twelve books. Not a lot to shout about, I know, but after five years, that becomes $3, 600 per annum, which is not a bad holiday every year for the rest of your life in exchange for reading and translating books part-time! With good marketing skills, could you make that $10 per book per month? Or $20? That is up to the publishing partnership. In fact, the literary translator has a very large rôle to play. He or she is actually pivotal to the financial success of the book.
Why? Because the author might have a large following, but it will be in his or her native tongue. For example, I have 100,000+ followers, and 250,000 pages of my blog are read by 30,000 visitors every month, but they are all English-speakers, or 99% of them are. This is not going to help sell, say, a German translation on a foreign market by any significant amount. However, the German translator might only have 5,000 followers, but the vast majority of them will read and write German! With my 1% of 100,000, I might reach a few speakers of German, but the translator can reach thousands upon thousands of them on international markets via a newsletter, a blog or website and social media!
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