Translation with no up front cost

[Krazykiwi]

Babelcube is a translation service with a business model somewhat similar to the Audible royalty split model.

Basically, they will provide you a freelance translator, in return for distribution rights to the translation for a fixed term of five years. During that time, you split the royalties with them (and the translator), initially evenly, but if the book sells well, you can end up with 75%. After the five years is up, the rights revert to you, and you can republish it as you wish.

Pros:
* No up front cost
* You of course own the translation copyright
* They have access to a ton of language-specific stores that are otherwise difficult to get into, even if you do have a translation.
* You can try out the translators with a 10 page sample, and if you don't like the quality, fire them.

Cons:
* The translators are freelancers, and as such the quality is wildly variable.
* Ideally you want a fluent speaker of the language the book is written in, translating into their native language as the target, and you need access to another native speaker of that language if you aren't one, to really know if the translation is any good. Preferably a couple of them.
For a language with few speakers, such as Romanian, there may not be any translators available. If you want to translate an English book into Spanish or German though, there's plenty to choose from.
* If no translators like the look of your book, they won't offer on it. You might be waiting a while.
* You are selling publication rights on the translation for 5 years but that's pretty normal for a publishing contract. You can of course continue publishing the original language book yourself!

Versus the cost of hiring a professional translator yourself, this may not be a bad deal.
The revenue split, across different sales tiers
How it works, which I summarised above, but this is the whole workflow

Consider this a public service announcement. I don't work for or have any affiliation with this company, other than if I was still working freelance, I'd probably sign up with them.

[Nik]

Good to know, cool stuff. A viable alternative for Emanuel Andrei and other authors, who want to go multilingual

[Marie Silk]

Great info Krazykiwi, thank you! I appreciate your PSAs!