We do not need translation corrections: our translator knows better how this should be translated

This post is an attempt to reach publishers. That they heard and reacted to their translations more responsibly.

During my development journey, I bought many different books. Books of various publishers. Both small and large. First of all - large publishers who have the opportunity to invest in the translation of technical literature. These were all kinds of books: we all went or go through the path of finding ourselves. And all these books were united by one thing: they were translated so that they could not be read. Over time, of course, you get used to translating the terms (translating yourself to those that are used daily) and to the broken style of presentation, which shows that this text is taken from English. However, there is no habit to the price that publishers ask for popular publications.

Publishers are invited to comment

Let's try to understand what a book is? Take a book with a volume of 600 pages, which is something average in the market of IT publications. Printing one copy, based on the price tag of the Chekhov Printing House, which is used by large publishers, is 175 p. A seal, for example, 2,000 copies is equal to 350,000 rubles. Further, if you take a popular book, then its price will be about 1,500 p. Those. the publication will receive (1,500 - 175) * 2,000 - 13% = 2,305,000 p.

But the publisher has a lot of expenses. Below are my pathetic attempts to calculate, but the Publisher Peter came into the comment and explained in more detail. I copy from the comment + link to the comment:

The answer is IMnEpaTOP . There are many other interesting things , I advise you to read

1. You forgot about the payment to the copyright holder / author (advance + royalties).
2. You incorrectly calculated taxes (underestimated). There is VAT, there are taxes.
3. You did not take into account the “turnover rate”, which dictates the requirements for marginality. As you yourself noticed, the book is not published in a month. The circulation is not for sale in a month. And the costs from the very start are not very small (advance + administration, which preceded the search, acceptance for publication, obtaining rights). And the expenses accompany the book until the very sale of the last copy. If the publication does not bring more income than alternative methods of investment, then why should the publishing house exist?
4. If you have a team, then there is an office (s) where they work on certain computers, etc ... Their maintenance costs money.
5. The assumption that employee salaries are a small percentage is only relevant if there are really many books. But if there are a lot of them, inevitably a little attention is paid to them (which you don’t like). And if there are few books in the work, then the percentage of these expenses cannot be small. In general, this expense item dynamically takes as much as readers are willing to pay extra for it.
6. Commercial risk. Not all books are sold on schedule, which means that at best, not all books are profitable. Moreover, not all books are in principle sold out. Naturally, all these risks are calculated and offset by an increase in the price of all books that are published. Thus, popular books pay for unsuccessful ones.
7. The most unsuccessful point of your calculation is the distributor's commission. It is not fixed 150r. It is not fixed at all. Publisher ships books in bulk. Networks are shelved at whatever price they consider justifiable. In your calculation, the publisher’s price tag is increased by ~ 10%. This is very far from the truth (the difference at times, the increase from the price of the publisher can reach 60%, which the wholesaler takes to himself).

Therefore, the exhaust will be, but not fabulous. For example, a little more than 500,000 rubles with 2,000 copies will end up on accounts. From the point of view of big business, the amount is not that serious. Therefore, publishers are beginning to save. For example, in the list above, I did not indicate the proofreading by the carriers of the technology about which the book was written. Why? Because the publishers have given the model "technical experts read the book for free, correct, correct, and in return - get their name in small print somewhere where no one reads." One is a sense of self-importance, the other is cost reduction. Sounds great if not for one but.

Publishers do not need our edits.

Not everyone knows, but I have a little work that I write from time to time. It lies on github and is distributed under a free license. I turned to two publications with this work of mine (I won’t give the names, but their books are on your shelves). The first time I tried to appeal in the early days, when it was written 30 percent. Then, after a long correspondence (about 80 letters), we argued:

• I wanted my cover, which I ordered from the designer of the Lebedev studio. They are not;
• they wanted me to delete all copies of the book from github. This is impossible, so I argued that it was impossible;
• I wanted to reserve the right to separately publish the English version. They imposed a ban, justifying this by the fact that if an English-language publishing house approached them, they did not want to give up the opportunity to make money on it. But they have never been addressed .
  
  I demanded to amend the contract, but they did it in such a way that outwardly everything looked as if I could be published in English separately - in another publishing house. But in fact - no. That was the end of the conversation.

I turned to another publication. They asked the text for review, I sent. They rolled out the conditions:

• The publication will cost me from 200,000 rubles.
• from 500 copies
• low density paper (a la newsprint, when the letters shine through);
• during implementation - 45% to me, 55% - to them.

At the same time, the work was checked by their translator. Those. what does it mean?

The publisher has no programmers. Instead, there are people who do technical translation. The publisher does not have programmers in the manual. What is this talking about? That the leadership does not know what the text is about. They essentially only care about sales. There is a person in the state who translates technical literature. He probably ate a dog on this? So they trust him, consider him an expert in this field. This person receives a book from some author as an input and compares it with his own experience. Since books go to his entrance in a stream + some is in the process, he will not delve into the text much. What they wrote to me:

Quote: "This is not a destructor at all, as it might initially seem due to the similarity of the declaration of finalizers in C # and destructors in C ++. The finalizer, unlike the destructor, is guaranteed to be called, while the destructor may not be called"

Translator: The statement “a destructor in C ++ may not be called” is complete nonsense (and this is not to mention the use of the return form of the verb, which is inappropriate here).

The discussion of exceptions in the second part is more interesting, but hardly original - in Richter’s book "CLR via C #" all this is for certain. The promised multithreading is beautifully covered in the translated book by the Publishing House on this subject.

The author’s treatment of terminology also does not contribute to the credibility of the book.

But here is another example: literally on one page three translations of the same term are used (stack unwinding): promotion, expansion and unwinding. How to evaluate it?

In general, for publication in the form of a book, the material must either be rewritten or carefully edited.

I do not pretend to be a good syllable, lack of errors in grammar, spelling. But ... does the translator analyze technology description errors? And surely so, offering to rewrite everything and without thinking that he does not know something. The answer was this:

if you do not free memory from the object, the destructor will not be called, because there will be a memory leak.

Exceptions are described everywhere superficially, unlike my book.

The author’s treatment of terminology also does not contribute to the credibility of the book.

This is the terminology of programmers. Is your expert a .NET developer?

But here is another example: literally on one page three translations of the same term are used (stack unwinding): promotion, expansion and unwinding. How to evaluate it?

All three words are actively used.

At the same time, I tried myself in editing the translation from English into Russian. Text is a typical hell. Both in style and in translation of terms. Those. it is written in Russian, but not in Russian. It is written in English. Is that familiar? I roll up my sleeves and start to rule. Sometimes in paragraphs. The answer was something like this: why are you doing this? We know better how it should be right. Our translator is very good and after it there is no need to look at the style and translation. Only some terms code listings. No need to waste time translating.

How to

I translate into English by bartov-e . Here he and his team have a completely different approach. Therefore, I have something to compare. He and the second translator at first filled me with questions. About inheritance, Wirth tables. methods about GC. They asked so many questions that I’m sure: both of them would have passed an interview on a .NET programmer. Then, over time, questions became less and less. And at the moment there are almost none. Why? Because they came to the correct terminology. And recently he threw me this:

To say that I was surprised is to say nothing. Those. it turns out that translations can be good? :) But on one condition: when the editing from the programmer is parallel to the translation, and not at the very end, when the publisher will feel sorry for the time spent.

Editor and programmer must work in parallel with translation

Conclusions for yourself

Publishers do not need high-quality translations into Russian. This is expensive for them. While the programmer subtracts, until he makes the full editing, until it is agreed with the publisher (disputes for each paragraph), a lot of time will pass. Maybe even a year. During this time, the technology may become obsolete and useless to anyone. And the book should be thrown on the shelf right now, while the topic is hot.

On the other hand, the Internet is full of articles. Free articles. And the publisher is losing customers. Especially possessing a lousy translation. But, dear publishers. Why are we buying books?

Personally, I take books because the author of the book, unlike the author of the article, thinks globally. Those. I get a deeper and more thoughtful description of the technology. It’s easier for me personally to read a book than from a reader or screen. There is no screen luminosity, you can scroll through the pages. Because I get tired of the screens and I want something tactile. A book.

Therefore, dear publishers. Mammoths of printing. Among translators there is a translation order. If the first translator is a native speaker, then in any case, the native speaker will be editing. After all, this does not seem strange to you. This is logical and it seems normal to you. So in the case of IT books, programmers are carriers. And we need to listen. So that later we read your books, and you have income in the era of blogs and free information.