The one thing I often get told when I talk about the US/Anglophone dominance of the spec-fic market is some variant of “good translations are expensive, and the market is stretched so there is no money for it”. I’m sorry, that’s just not a valid reason.

Yes, I fully agree that a good translator is expensive. Translating, say, from French to English is more expensive than taking an English author direct. In this we totally agree. But…

But wanna take a guess as to how much a good translator from English into French costs, and how much cheaper it would be to buy a local author? ‘cos it’s known as a symmetrical problem, and we all have the same problems: the literary market is somewhat small (as opposed to TV, for instance), and overstretched.

Most non-Anglophone publishing houses have a fairly large Foreign Rights/Foreign Acquisitions department, which also handles translations. It’s an accepted part of the budget as much as paying authors for books and paying artists for cover art. Most Western Anglophone houses… don’t exactly seem to have the equivalent department. So the “we don’t have any money for translations” thing? Please don’t try to tell me that. It doesn’t stand.

I’ll accept the “there is no market for translations” as a valid point–but then I’ll ask you to start wondering: why is there no market for translations in the US/UK, and plenty in other countries?

My essay on non-Western, no-Anglophone SF is now up on the Asimov’s website. Go here to read it.

Mostly around the Spinrad article for Asimov’s, which is a bit like watching a trainwreck in progress. (he tries to make a bunch of good points, but they get lost in some poor phrasing and some appalling ideas)
-The original article (incidentally, in the morass of stuff that made me want to hit something, there was the bit where he gushed about the Maya novel and its rigorous research–said research including choice bits like “Ancient Mayan codices [predicting] the end of the world in our era on a very specific date shortly approaching”. Er, no, sorry? That’s Christian Apocalypse eschatology getting mixed with the Maya calendar)
-Some back-and-forth going on on Jason Sanford’s blog
-Cheryl Morgan about translation markets and the isolationist nature of the US book market
-Nick Mamatas on the stuff Spinrad gets woefully wrong
-The awesome Charles A. Tan nails a lot of what I thought about the article in his editorial for the World SF blog (also, very nice stuff about mixed heritages/cultures, which I haven’t seen that often online).

I could rant, but honestly I feel the article and the comments are self-explanatory; and I’m reassured so many people are seeing it as problematic rather than taking it as gospel. I could dissect the article point by point (and believe me, there would be a lot of points to make, but I like my blood pressure the way it i. I think instead I’m going to go back to that article I was writing about Anglophone SF vs the rest of the world…

Up, about and already late…

I’ll leave you with further linkage to Apex Book of World SF contributors, proving just exactly how indefatigable Charles Tan can be: Han Song from China, Anil Menon from India, Tunku Halim from Malaysia, and Dean Francis Alfar from the Philipines.

Taking the neo with me to improve wordcount on Harbinger of the Storm (24600 words, two murders, one major antagonist, and counting)

Happy birthday to Mike Munsil, Liberty Hall founder. Hope it’s a good one!

In other non-related news, here’s some linkage: the other interviews on SF Signal of the contributors of the Apex Book of World SF include French dark fantasy author Mélanie Fazi, horror writer and AR author Kaaron Warren, and Croatian Aleksandar Ziljak (whose story “An Evening in The City Coffeehouse, with Lydia on my mind” is up in the November issue of Apex Magazine).

In the tradition of SF Signal‘s Mind Melds, the World SF blog is hosting a series of round tables by authors. The first topic, “On environment and background”, just went up, with answers from fellow AR author Kaaron Warren, fellow Shimmer author Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Vandana Singh and me. Thank to Lavie Tidhar and Charles Tan for starting this!

In other news, Lavie Tidhar’s World SF Blog is moving over to WordPress. So if you want to keep receiving the latest news about World SF (and I’d definitely recommend you to, because it’s chockfull of fascinating overviews of SF in the non-anglophone world), here’s where you should go:

http://worldsf.wordpress.com/
LJ syndication (not entirely sure this is working yet)

Lavie has also posted something I should have thought of earlier: Elisabeth Vonarburg’s planned GOH speech for Worldcon, which is a very interesting overview of her relationship with English. Read it here.

My name is Elisabeth Vonarburg and I don’t speak Klingon.

I do speak English, though, more or less. But just in case, I brought my Faithful Igor, who will translate the less intelligible parts if needs be.

In fact, I love the English language. I loved it first, and learned it much on my own because it was the language of Peter, Paul & Mary, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen (whom I didn’t know was a Canadian and a Montrealer, at the time, when I was living in France. In that respect, France is not very different from the States : lots of Canadians get lost in the shuffle. Hey, they speak & write in English, don’t they ? More or less.)