Breaking Into Book Translation

Recently, a colleague with ample translation experience contacted me with some questions about breaking into book translations. For freelance translators, fiction and non-fiction books present an opportunity to expand our offer and to learn about the publishing business. Our exchange focused on the business end, not the challenges of the translation itself. “Book translation” can be as small as a few hundred words for a children’s book to a thick novel or textbook.

Subject: Questions from a “newbie”

Dear JT –

[…] As an ATA colleague, I’m reaching out to you to get some information about the following situation.

I’ve been a freelance translator, EN>XX for about 20 years now. I’ve always worked with translation agencies. But recently, an author contacted me to translate several of her books into EN. I need to send her an estimate.

My questions for you are: how do I do that? Do I base my estimate on a word count? I would use a proofreader/editor for my work. I guess I would include this cost in the estimate. Is there any sample estimate I can find anywhere?

When you translate a book, do you get royalties for every book you have translated that is sold? If so, do I need a legal contract from a lawyer? I want to mention that my potential client is in Europe, and I am in the US.

My questions may sound childish, but I’ve never done this before (I told you I was a newbie!). The bottom line is I really want to do this project and I want to make sure that my estimate will help me get this project.

Thank you very much for your help.

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I hear questions like these at every ATA Conference. Perhaps you have shared some of her concerns.

Here is my reply:

Dear xxxx –

Thank you for your email. […] I hope my answers will not discourage you, but help you plan an approach that will work for you. I was a technical translator for fifty-five years. I “retired” from commercial translation, because I was not getting my own books written. […] Since then, I have published six new books, but I have also translated five books for others. […] On my website, you can see what I have been doing.

You asked me about estimates and royalties, but they are the easy part. I will take your subject line to heart and offer advice on more than you asked.

First, I noticed immediately that you are proposing to translate AWAY from your mother tongue. I can’t tell you not to do that, because I was bidirectional myself as a teenager. I know a few (less than four) truly bidirectional translators who have lived and worked in their source language country like yourself for many years, usually completely immersed in the source language at a high level (i.e., married to an educated Anglophone, working in an academic or a rigorously professional context, like law or diplomacy). Apparently, you still work EN>XX. Is your English also at an A level? To give you an idea, the bidirectional translators I mentioned are ATA-certified in both directions.

Mitigating circumstances may prevail if the books are non-fiction and aimed at a specific readership. For example, medicine, textbooks, self-help and health, or travel. The readership may be international English speakers whose specialized language you understand, or a general audience if you can translate the technical material for them. Certain fiction, like children’s literature, may also be suitable if you know the world and the literature of the target readers.

Second, have the books been published in the source language? Normally, it is the publisher who arranges for foreign language rights and translation rights. Even if the author wants to do this as a personal project, she may have signed away those rights to the publisher without realizing it. The translated books could not then be sold without the publisher’s permission. You could translate them and hold the translation copyright, but you need the foreign language rights to commercialize the translations.

Have the books been self-published, or is the author planning to self-publish them? If so, you are not talking about royalties, but a direct-client relationship: lump sum or a partial payment schedule, after which the author is free to do what she wants. I convey translation copyright to my work after payment of the last invoice in full. How would an author keep track of something like royalties, even if she wanted to be fair and pay you?

Third, you could launch a career as a literary translator. However, almost all literary translators I know are academics who translate during office hours when no students have come to see them. In other words, each has a day job that gives them the time and income to translate. Some are living on pensions from prior day jobs. I won’t say “retired,” because they are working full-time on their translations.

That said, let me address your questions.

Royalties. Typically, the translator of a traditionally published book gets a small portion of the percentage that the author gets of the net revenue from book sales. Without running the numbers, you can see that this means that the translator will not earn much. Academics can list translations in their curricula vitae and use them to apply for promotion and tenure, but certainly not count on them as income. Should the book(s) become best-seller(s), the glow will attract invitations to make paid presentations, teach courses, or to publish one’s own articles, books, and stories. The translator royalties from a bestseller might be measurable after the advance to the author is paid, but you would not build a budget on that.

Translators never receive advances on sales. Often, neither do the authors, unless or until they are famous.

Contract. You always need a contract, signed by both parties before you start working. The ATA, the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA), and PEN Center America (Translation section) have models you can use. You must modify them, and you should be prepared to negotiate with the publisher. When working with an individual author, I usually let my estimate serve as the contract, but the items mentioned in the Model Contract from ATA, ALTA, and PEN are in the estimate, and I require the client (author) to confirm acceptance.

You use the term “legal contract,” but this is an oxymoron. Under business law (the Uniform Commercial Code here in the USA), a contract is a legal term and concept. It can be an oral agreement sealed with a handshake, but it is still a contract, and it is legal. The reason we get contracts in writing is to prove easily that the contract exists after one party or the other breaks it. In an honorable world, we would still need oral or written contracts, because they help us avoid misunderstandings.

When preparing a contract (including the way I use estimates), know what terms you are willing to negotiate and what will make you walk away. For example, you may not convince a publisher to put your name in the same size font as the author on the cover, but they might accept a smaller font. I always insist that my name and my translation copyright appear on the copyright page and in the cataloging data, because that is part of the legal identity of the book under its ISBN and Library of Congress Classification Number.

Jurisdiction must be spelled out in an international contract (see why publishers do this and not authors?). The laws for intellectual property are very different in North America and the EU, and you must establish where misunderstandings will be mediated or adjudicated. A publisher will have legal representatives or even a fully staffed office with a legal department in the USA. An author may or may not even know an intellectual property lawyer.

Estimates. You stated upfront that you want the estimate to help you get this project. That sounds like, “I would do it for free” to me. Did you mean “I would do it for free, but I can’t afford to set aside my other translation work for it.”?

In the estimate for Beyond the Age of Oil, by Leonardo Maugeri, I tossed in a 60% discount against “future sales.” I was excited about this project, and I wanted to do it (sound familiar?), so I showed the publisher the full cost of my commercial rate, and the impact of the discounts and potential royalties. They were delighted. What I did not point out (though they probably guessed it) was that the up-front fee I requested allowed me to set aside other work and get the book translated. Also, the royalties discount drove the bottom line to my break-even point. I would not make money in the absence of royalties, but I was not giving my work away. In fact, I never saw royalties from the book, though it had an impact on the history of energy economics. It was not a mass-market potboiler, and available only in hard cover; you won’t find it at Walmart or Costco.

The key to all this is never to go below your break-even point, and to be sure that your break-even point is enough money to live on. See my booklet on the subject if you haven’t already.

For Maugeri’s debut novel, I charged him my normal commercial rate, took my payment, and conveyed the translation copyright to him. He would need the translation copyright to market the book to an agent. He intended to publish it first in English, because translated crime novels from the USA sell better in Italy than Italian novels. What I charged him after discounts was still above my break-even point, so this was on a par with my commercial translation work.

Yes, the estimate should include the subcontracting for an editor and a proofreader. Since you are working away from XX, I would look for Anglophones for both those jobs. The editor may be a monolingual editor or a bilingual revisor. I pay them by the hour, although my current editor and proofreader bill me lump-sum fixed rates based on my word count. Regardless, you should include them as line items in your estimate. I don’t mark up their cost, but you are handling the project management for the quality control, so don’t feel guilty about charging for your time.

The estimate may look like it was based on a word count. However, the real basis for my estimate is always the time it will take to do the job. The per-word rates shown in my estimates come from years of Excel® spreadsheets tabulating how long it took me to translate. I knew how fast I could translate a Word® file by Maugeri. For a fully annotated, scholarly translation of a seventeenth-century letter, the rate would be higher, with a surcharge for transcribing the handwriting.

For each author who has paid me to translate his book, there have been three to five who have walked away disheartened when they learn what our expertise costs. Sometimes the best I can do for them is to ask the hard questions (Do you have the foreign language rights to your own book? Why isn’t your publisher contacting me?), so they can be smarter with their agent or publisher the next time. Those who could accept my estimate had the resources to pay my invoice, whether personally or through their firms. The translated books on my website include an academic press, one general publisher, and a Northern Italian bank. Other clients include a children’s publisher, a non-profit association, and an architectural firm. Each would be a “direct client” as we understand it in ATA.

You wrote, “I need to send her an estimate.” To do it for free or below your break-even point, generate an estimate showing the full cost and discount it to whatever she can pay. If there is a non-profit involved, you could bill the translation through them, showing a line item for your pro-bono work as a professional. The IRS takes a dim view of our giving our work away.

I hope this helps[…]

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About the Author

Jonathan T. Hine translated his first book, a medical text, in 1962 and worked as a translator and escort interpreter through high school and a naval career. A graduate of the US Naval Academy (BS), the University of Oklahoma (MPA) and the University of Virginia (PhD), he is ATA-certified (I-E) and belongs to the National Capital Area Translators Association. He was the founding Secretary-Treasurer of the American Translation and Interpreting Studies Association.

When not writing his own books, he translates book-length fiction and non-fiction from Italian. More at http://jthine.com. Contact him at: jt@jthine.com