A translation is a derivative work, but it can carry its own copyright. What decides ownership in practice is not the law, it is the contract the translator signs.
Posts with tag.: Literary Translation
Canada's first translation rights fair brought seventy publishers together to trade translation rights, the transaction that decides which books ever cross a language border.
The Best Translated Book Award longlist covered 19 countries and 12 languages, and its shape shows exactly which literatures get bought in English and which do not.
St Stephen's College opened a Centre for Translations to move academic and cultural texts between India's languages, and to train the translators who would do it.
MLA job listings stop falling but do not recover, leaving new PhDs in English and foreign languages fighting over a shrunken pool of tenure-track posts.
Farideh Mahdavi-Damghani, the award-winning Iranian translator, visited Korea and found almost no Korean literature available in Persian, and set out to change that.
Foreign governments and foundations are funding their own way into the US book market, tackling the 3 percent problem that keeps translated literature off American shelves.
An American indie bookseller launched an Against Amazon blog while serving as a judge for the Best Translated Book Award, which Amazon now funds with a 25,000 dollar grant.
Google built a system to translate poetry with metre and rhyme intact. The experiment exposed exactly where machine translation stops being translation.
Talisman Theatre stages English translations of new Quebec plays, forcing hard choices about jokes, religion and how much culture a translator should carry across.
Argentina used its Frankfurt Book Fair guest slot to build SUR, a subsidy fund that paid for 300 translations in 14 months and outlived the fair itself.
Moscow’s Library of Foreign Literature wants an Institute of Translation, a House of the Translator, to push Russian authors abroad through better foreign translations.
Two handwritten pages cut from Chamber of Secrets go on show in a Galloway bookshop. Rowling gave them to fund a Scots dictionary, which is the better story.
Russia is founding an Institute of Translation for literature, a grant-giving body rather than a school, after officials admitted translators had been left without state support.
Iran’s ICRO has been handed a state mandate to translate Islamic and humanities books into world languages. Selecting the right titles is the hard part.
Only seven Chinese titles made it into the 348 translated books published in the US last year. The bottleneck is not talent, it is the translation pipeline.
English translations turned Tamil and Hindi pulp fiction into respectable reading, and a $2.9 billion Indian publishing market is riding the change.