kude.punny

The “Quiet” Translators

Long before the copyright battle began between Youth Publishing House and translators of Harry Potter 7, many young translators, for diverse reasons, were quietly translating foreign works and posting them on the Internet.

Sharing favorite works with others

According to most of them, they translate books and films online out of the desire to brush up on their knowledge of foreign languages as well as to share with the e-community excellent works of art.

“I want to give readers more options and shorten the distance between readers and writers,” explained Le Do Linh Nga, who first entered the online translating world with a few short stories and later impressed with Give Me a Cigarette, a longer piece by a Chinese author.

Beside individual translators, those with the same tastes also establish fan clubs to translate their favourite works. And the translators’ endless individual or collective efforts to promote foreign works are highly appreciated by many readers.

Dang Hong Nhung, a Vietnamese student in the Netherlands, for instance, said, “Without their Vietnamese versions on the Internet, a student living overseas like me would never have a chance to read contemporary Chinese literature, Japanese comics or watch Korean films.”

Quality

To many people, young online translators’ works aren’t of very high quality. The opposite, however, is often true, because many of them take their jobs seriously, though they aren’t being paid for what they are doing.

Xuan Minh, a young translator of Chinese knight-errant stories, for example, said he constantly learned from Internet forums, books and friends choice words that helped to improve the quality of his Vietnamese versions.

Nga Linh’s translations are also found to be good. A former literature student at Hanoi-Amsterdam High, Linh takes pains to explore and understand life in Beijing in particular and in China in general in order to translate Chinese works better.

She also has the good habits of providing footnotes to make it easier for her readers to understand foreign works, reading comments from readers and editing her versions again and again until they satisfy difficult online readers.

Some translating groups such as accvn.net, which specialises in translating Japanese picture books, are quite professional. Each translation work goes through four phases: translating, proof reading, editing and quality checking.

Those interested in becoming translators for the group have to take assessment tests, as well as follow the group’s numerous rules.

And the battle with publishers

Now that the debate between Harry Potter 7’s online translators and Youth Publishing House, which will release the Vietnamese version of the book this October, is getting bitter and involving legal authorities, many translators are taken aback by the fact that the job which they have done passionately without an eye to material reward is being denounced as illegal.

Translators like Xuan Minh and accvn.net said they only translated after getting permission to do so from authors or publishers or when they were sure that their works would not jeopardise others’ interests.

And according to many, the online posting of translation works isn’t as harmful to publishers and book distributors as one often believes them to be. Nguyen Hong Yen from Back Viet Book Company, for instance, said, “I think translating and posting foreign works on the Internet don’t affect book companies much.

“Many online readers become interested enough to buy books after they read the translations online.” In addition, through these online versions, potential and talented translators can be discovered. Many bloggers agree.

Thu Ha from Hanoi, said, “I still want to have the print copy of a book even after reading it online.” And in a survey carried out on the website of Harry Potter Fan Club in Vietnam, all young readers responded that though they had read the Vietnamese version on the Internet, they would surely buy Youth Publishing House’s version when it came out.

All that said, the translators of Harry Potter 7 have halted the posting of Harry Potter 7 on the Internet, admitting, “Our distribution of the Vietnamese version is wrong and violates copyright laws.” They added, however, that they wouldn’t give up and would “soon return”.

được đăng bởi kude.punny @ 07:45