Gig
asked
Isaac Marion:
Hello Isaac, With the The Burning World on its way, I would like to ask you this - to what extend you and your publishing team allow changes made to the content, or parts being removed from it, when the book is translated and published for a particular country market? Of course, I'm asking about countries and markets that do not have any specific restrictions or regulations for the content of a book.
Isaac Marion
That's a really interesting question, and the answer is...I have no idea! I have essentially zero communication with any of the foreign publishers. But it's something I wonder about all the time, because translation isn't just a clean conversion from one language to another, like GIF to JPG. That might work for a textbook, but the more distinctive and stylized a piece of writing is, the more the translator has to filter it through their own creative lens. In some cases, the translator must be basically writing a novel of their own, loosely based on the original.
The weird reality is, I play absolutely no role in that process. WARM BODIES has been translated into 25 languages, and not once has a translator contacted me to ask about an idiom or clarify the intention of a sentence. They are 100% winging it. And I have no way of ever verifying the quality of a translation because—duh—I don't know the language.
So I really have no idea what's in those editions. I know that a lot of them change the title—without my input, of course. Most of them I never even hear about, but I know it's HOT BLOOD in Portuguese, MY PALE FRIEND in German, and MR. ZOMBIE in Dutch. And one can only assume if they change the title, they're changing other stuff too—possibly even major edits, abridgments, censorship, etc. But I'll never find out either way, because I have a hard enough time communicating with the publisher right here in New York, so the ones in other countries speaking other languages might as well be on other planets. It bothers me, not knowing what's being put out there with my name on it, but there's not much I can do. I can only hope some eager bilingual fan would let me know if they see anything egregious!
The weird reality is, I play absolutely no role in that process. WARM BODIES has been translated into 25 languages, and not once has a translator contacted me to ask about an idiom or clarify the intention of a sentence. They are 100% winging it. And I have no way of ever verifying the quality of a translation because—duh—I don't know the language.
So I really have no idea what's in those editions. I know that a lot of them change the title—without my input, of course. Most of them I never even hear about, but I know it's HOT BLOOD in Portuguese, MY PALE FRIEND in German, and MR. ZOMBIE in Dutch. And one can only assume if they change the title, they're changing other stuff too—possibly even major edits, abridgments, censorship, etc. But I'll never find out either way, because I have a hard enough time communicating with the publisher right here in New York, so the ones in other countries speaking other languages might as well be on other planets. It bothers me, not knowing what's being put out there with my name on it, but there's not much I can do. I can only hope some eager bilingual fan would let me know if they see anything egregious!
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