It was exactly five years ago that I launched the website We Love Translations.
I’ve learned a lot in that time about the work of translation, patterns in translation histories, the market for classic literature, the relative popularity of different works, and about running a website.
About the work of translation
- Balancing how a translated text sounds and what it means is hard, and everyone does it, and everyone does it slightly differently. There is no right way.
- Translations are less likely to be anonymous than previously; sometimes the translator even gets his/her name on the cover (and spine!).
- Retranslations may adhere to stricter literary standards or looser literary standards than previous translations, depending on the publisher’s goal.
About patterns in translation histories
- An old work’s publishing history is complicated by omission of publication date in books, omission of the translator’s name, and by outright text piracy by unauthorized publishers.
- The number of translations can increase dramatically after the original text enters the public domain.
- Publishing technologies have changed over time, with implications for how faithfully an author’s or translator’s manuscript is reproduced.
- Digitization of old translations is patchy; some books are scanned and transcribed, some are scanned, and some are not.
About the market for classic literature
- Publishers have different target audiences; some aim to provide more annotation and critical analysis, some simply aim to make a work widely available and possibly easy to read.
- Many publishers offer cheap reprints of public domain translations.
- Many individuals are selling ebooks of public domain translations. (I have so many thoughts about that…)
About the relative popularity of different works
- Russian literature is more popular than I realized.
- Readers are not accustomed to considering different translations of many (most?) foreign books, particularly books thought of as children’s books.
- Asian classic literature is a small niche within an already kinda small niche in publishing.
About running a website
- Feedback is important. It is gratifying when people tell me that the site I built is informative or useful. However, people seldom point out omissions, broken links, or other mistakes, and seldom make requests for more information or features, although it would be helpful if they did.
- Comment spam is annoying. There are bots that write what sound like relevant comments in an attempt to get me to approve them so that they can attach a link to the user’s name. But almost without exception, if there is a link, the comment is spam, no matter what it says.
- Relying on Google was always a bad idea. I just didn’t know how bad until Google started putting AI summaries above the search results. Traffic is down 60%. Revenue this year is more or less what it was five years ago, when the site only had translation comparison pages for 4 books. Now it has pages for 33 books.
- I like finding and organizing information. If I didn’t, I would not keep working on the site. It pays for itself in terms of web hosting costs, but it absolutely does not compensate me for my time.
