[Window Bar]

Any writers who have direct or indirect publishing relationships with Apple just saw their market area grow by 26 more countries-- all in Europe. What's next: Mandarin Chinese? Japanese? Probably.

My thoughts: Most fantasy/sci-fi is published in English. Sure, many sci-fi enthusiasts, wherever they may reside, speak and read English. But English is not the be-all / end-all of the literary world. Given the low-cost (no-cost) production expense of bringing out mutliple ebook editions, is it time for authors, agents and publishers alike to begin looking toward more translations?

If so, how? Hired? Joint ventures? As fantasy / sci-fi people, we're supposedly futurists of a sort. Is it up to us to help shape that future? Are there speakers of Spanish, Portuguese, German, French, et al, on these boards? What are your ideas?

Here's a link regarding Apple's move: http://blog.smashwords.com/2011/10/apple-ibookstore-expands-smashwords.html.

In closing: Thank you, Steve Jobs (co-founder and long-term soul of Apple Computers) for a life well lived. Rest in Peace.

-- WB

[KatG]

Yeah, that was really sad for them right when they had all these things in motion. He really battled for the company even when he was very ill.

English versions do well in large parts of Asia, so it's really just a matter of working out copyright and trade issues for Apple to add countries on. Thousands of Asian titles are available in their native languages electronically now, just not always through the English world market.

Translations, either from one language to English, or from English to another language, are more difficult because there is a dearth of good translators to do them. It is easier to get them for Europe, where the translation/export market has been much larger for much longer, than Asia and Africa, but it is happening. Publishers have been working on it, as well as connecting up the English language world market, for some time.

Science fiction and fantasy magazines, etc., have long tried to keep connections between countries and get authors of all languages heard internationally, more than most kinds of fiction. But without translators, it's slow and the translations are more expensive. But it happens more and more each day.

If you haven't already checked out the World SF Blog, run by Apex Books which is also doing international publishing, it's worth doing:

http://worldsf.wordpress.com/

Gadfly author Nick Mamatas' day job is as editor of Haikasoru, an imprint of Viz Media that has translated Asian SFF for the English market, and there are quite a few of those operations going on, re Spanish/South America, etc.

[txshusker]

I have a friend at Google who began her career there translating news articles between German, Dutch and English. That took 11-15 people and is time consuming, and those are minor compared to pages of prose. I can't imagine the manpower needed to translate large qtys of books. It currently looks limited by that, not the means of dispersement. I can't see it going beyond best sellers still because of that.

Which is quite unfortunate, as my 4th favorite book is foreign language original and I'm glad they got a good translation of it done to English.

Unless someone can make babelfish competent!