>Well, I don't know who your acquaintances are but
most of the novelists I
know
>are getting quite a few peanuts. Certainly not what
they deserve (in
most
>cases), but enough to do the math and realize that a
translation could
easily be
>factored in to the advance a publisher paid a good
foreign author and
the
>publisher would still come out ahead if the book
found an audience. Since
the
>U.S. publishers don't buy a lot of foreign product
that would make this
a
>buyer's market for them, thus making it easier to
lowball the writer in
>question. You know, just like they do
here.
>
>> Translating isn't cheap, and you probably
couldn't
>> get a good (above Babelfish level) translator to
work on a possible
>> percentage sometime in the future, the way
writers do.
>
Have you really tried pricing competent to damn good
translators lately? As a gaijin living in Japan who only has
a child's command of Japanese, I consider myself lucky when I
end up paying about $400 US per 10 double spaced pages. I
also know from first hand experience, when proofing
translations from Japanese to English, I get $10/page. So sit
down and think about the costs in a 400+ page novel...
Admittedly, frnech or Spanish rates aren't as high, but when
you start dealing with fictional works which have very
nuanced and subtle meanings at times, you get what you pay
for in many cases (cheap translation, lousy
translation).
Later, Mark E. Hall (MEH)
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