Reader’s Report
Posted by Rachel
Translation is an aspect of getting published that we don’t think about very often. Once a book gets published, then a lot goes into whether deciding it will get translated. Part of that process is hiring someone to read the book and recommend whether the book would translate well in regards to language and content. Here’s an article on the reader’s report and the woes of translation, and how publications don’t go both ways in publishing (English to foreign, but not foreign to English).
Speaking of translations, the Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage (ADACH) of the United Arab Emirates announced a new program called Kalima to translate foreign books into Arabic. They have 100 titles chosen already in a wide array of topics from a variety of countries. The Publishers Weekly article didn’t say how they chose which books to translate, and I wonder what their process was.
More on translations. At the NY Anime Festival there was a panel on translating manga moderated by Anime News Network's Evan Miller. It included Del Rey Manga editor Tricia Narwani, TOKYOPOP's Alexis Kirsh, and freelance translator Christine Schilling. While they covered how they became translators, what skills are needed, tools that are useful (like a digital dictionary), and some of the difficulties of translating (like puns and honorifics), the biggest piece of advice was to go live in Japan for a while. This is true for any language you want to translate; you can’t be truly fluent until you’ve lived in that culture for a little while.
12/17/2007 11:24:38 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00) 
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