Getting crowdfunding for translating important, contemporary books

William Tierney wrote:

Don't bother with controlled mainstream publishing. There are plenty of organizations that can back or assist your efforts. Try Breitbart or Infowars as a start. If they don't involve themselves in hardcopy publishing, they may be able to point you in the right direction. As each day passes, the dinosaur media become more irrelevant, while the independent media show their credibility. There are a lot of people that would be interested in a German native's raw assessment of the situation in Germany. May Germany wake up and repel the invasion!

Joakim Braun wrote:

If the intention is publication, there's no point at all in starting a translation, crowd-funded or not, without permission of the copyright holder. You're very likely to be wasting your time. For one thing, there might already be a translation in the works! If you don't get a reply, that's a good indication you'd find no market when offering a completed translation either. (And publishing decisions, of physical books at least, aren't based on the availability of translations.)

yes good point.
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If you don't get a reply, that's a good indication you'd find no market when offering a completed translation either.

Yes, usually its a question of royalties. What about official and unofficial translations?
Does anyone have any legal expertise in this area?

"Finis Germania" is such a short work that you can handle it in your spare time. Perhaps the German publisher might be interested in a print-on-demand/e-book solution with profit sharing and no up-front cost for the translation. But you should always contact the copyright holder beforehand. The kind of reply (or non-reply) you receive will tell you something about what a future relationship might look like.

[Bearbeitet am 2018-03-15 11:37 GMT]

Michael Wetzel wrote:

I think you really ought to start with mainstream publishers like Penguin (Allen Lane): I only read the summary on Wikipedia about the book and while it couldn't find a mainstream publisher in Germany, this kind of stuff is obviously very correctly political in the English-speaking world at the moment. It even got a very positive write-up in the New York Times. Go to an airport bookstore and look at what gets published by mainstream publishers.

On the other hand, I can't imagine that the rights for "finis-Germania" haven't already been gobbled up: It's hardly an obscure book and the German edition and the controvesy aroundd it got significant English-language press. Maybe you should start a little more modestly.

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I chose that book because it was well-known and I hadnt see it in English not because I was necessarily thinking about translating it. I want to do the Solzhenitsyn book first if I get some crowd-funding

Or maybe you could write some unofficial sequels "Germania - adieu", "Germania - au revoir?", "Vere enim Germaniae", kind of like Star Wars ... You wouldn't need to buy any rights for that.

You cannot legally (officially or unofficially) publish a translation of a book that is in copyright if you have not been granted the right to do so by the person or entity who owns those rights (presumably the German publisher). If you want to publish a translation illegally, then I would definitely go for something more obscure and hope no one notices.

Stuff like this should be as easy to look up as a DNS lookup.

On the other hand, you can publish a translation of anything that is out of copyright. The copyright for all books written by authors who died in 1945 just ran out a couple years ago in most countries (70 years from death of author). Maybe you could dig up some historical gems for the benefit of humanity without all the legal hassle?