[SEAN H. ROBERTSON]

I'm thinking about taking a couple weeks off from writing and using Google Translate to convert a few of my most popular books into Spanish. Ever thought about it? 420 million speak Spanish as a native language, 80 million as a second language. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_language That's a half billion potential readers.

 

[Lissie]

So you insult them with a machine translation    If you are going to do it properly and hire a translator (and probably a proof reader too)

I don't know about your genre - for my travel books I decided that German was a better bet for the first language - it's a smaller number of speakers but a lot of them seem to read eBooks - nonfiction anyways

 

[Cory]

You're going to use Google translate?

As an aside, though there are a lot of people who speak Spanish, I've heard that they aren't the most voracious readers.

 

[Mip7]

Italy, Germany, and France are actually better markets. I wouldn't get around to Spanish until I had those covered first.

 

[FranceBarnaby]

I've translated several of mine to Spanish. I'm a native speaker. I started with a machine translation, then went through it with a fine toothed comb. Turns out I had to rewrite almost every sentence. Oddly it takes me longer to translate a story than it does to write it and edit it in English.

Please don't just upload a machine translation, it's unreadable and can be infuriating to purchase such a book.

As far as sales, I think I would have been better served writing more stories in English . It's just a much bigger market.

 

[SEAN H. ROBERTSON]

Thanks for your wise insight. Please keep your posts coming, as I'm still formulating my translation plans.

 

[Paul Clayton]

I'm looking for someone to translate some of my books into Spanish.  I think I would do well in the Caribbean area.  If anyone knows someone with some samples, let me know.

And, BTW, I'd be very leery of running a novel through a translating computer program.  Best!

 

[CoraBuhlert]

Echoing what others have said, don't publish a machine translation. Google Translate is good for situations where you need a quick overview of what a given text is about. It is no substitute for a proper translator. What you need is an experienced fiction translator, who is a native speaker of the target language and preferably has some experience with your genre. Unfortunately, good translators don't come cheap. But even no translation at all is better than insulting readers with the garbled mess produced by Google Translate.

 

[SEAN H. ROBERTSON]

Thanks everyone for your kind advice. Google Translation or any other machine translation is definitely now not an option. I guess my overall question was are you considering a Spanish translation of your books because of the potential reading audience?  Thank you all.

 

[dotx]

I'm fluent in Spanish and have worked as a translator (also written articles in Spanish for a number of well-known magazines). Still, I'm not sure I want to translate my own books into Spanish. If I wanted to start translating, I think I would go with German first.

 

[SEAN H. ROBERTSON]

I'm fluent in Spanish and have worked as a translator (also written articles in Spanish for a number of well-known magazines). Still, I'm not sure I want to translate my own books into Spanish. If I wanted to start translating, I think I would go with German first.

Thanks Diana!