Holy shit, this bring back memories. I did something similar with the Harry Potter series about 15 years ago - beat the publisher to translating the book. Doing that, strangely, is the one event that shaped my life the most.
I discovered Harry Potter series up until book 4 (The Globet of Fire) by renting books from a bookstore when I was 15. At that time, many Vietnamese kids were all eager for book 5 to come out. Except for when book 5, The Half-blood Prince came, we had to wait for it. We would have to wait for the "blessed" translator and the publisher to translate and churn out the whole book when a new book comes, and with all the proofreading it would take about 4-6 months. I decided that was too long and started posting on a quite popular forum my indie translation, then moved to my personal website. Being a 16-year-old having a summer break at that time, I had nothing better to do. My timetable was something like stay up all night to translate half a chapter, post the new translation, go to bed at 6 AM, wake up at 11 AM, the next day rinse and repeat. People loved it and many started contacting me to help with the translation. We had a YUUUUGE following to the point that I had to do nothing but just organizing and assigning who-does-what and then proofread it with my 16-year-old brain, but mostly we flew under the radar and it was easy. The complete translated book came out about 20 days after the English version. The normies still had to wait for the blessed book to read it, but anyone who had the Internet already read the whole story months earlier. People would bring A4-sized printouts to read at school and my older brother was asked more than once whether he knew the person who translated it from time to time.
Book 6 wasn't a happy story but a fun one. When book 6 came, I knew so much better that I knew to appoint someone that did the logistics for me. I did the fun part, code a website that allows us to automate the translation submission and make sure it can handle the traffic. At that time Vietnam has just signed the Bern copyright convention, and my indie translation was the center of attention. In the past book translation, we gave out our real names or real nick-names, however the translator wanted it. We had about 4-5 chapters churned out before we realized that we were in big troubles. I remember one night I received an email to my personal mailbox at 10 PM from a journalist asking something along the lines of "Do you know you're doing something illegal?" I was scared shitless and fucking deleted everything, thinking this is it - this is the end, and went to bed, not responding to the journalist. Then at 5 AM, not being able to sleep, I checked email again and the same reporter sent another email...
"I see that you deleted everything. This is totally not my intention. I won't rat you out. If possible, please let me know if we can do a secret interview. You might think that I am being dishonest but please trust me this time, I want you to continue what you are doing. I hope to see the new chapter coming out tomorrow."
I immediately removed all real names and asked everyone on the team to choose a nickname for themselves. I actually gave out my home address to the reporter and he turned out to be a hipster-looking student studying journalism writing part-time for a newspaper. We became good friends after that. Besides the interview, the translation at that time was so controversial that it sparked the discussion whether it is "right" or "wrong" to do on many online forums. I had google analytics at the time so I knew who was linking to the website. I registered a nickname just to talk my side of the story in one of them. It turned out that the admin of the forum was someone who studied in Princeton and three years later, when I dropped out of college, disheartened by what I saw and discouraged by what happened, he asked me to go study abroad. I would otherwise have never dreamt of doing that. Another online friend who is 40+ at that time asked me to work for him in the gap year, appointed me to his "vice-president" role of his company. The rest is just history. Thanks to the event and all that came after it, I knew probably 50% of all online friends that I admire and probably won't ever know otherwise.
By the way, when book 7 came out (when I was having my "gap year"), I decided not to do it anymore. It was too much to handle. Someone else I knew did it, though.
This reminds me somewhat of translations of Chinese webnovels. Many of them have hundreds or thousands of chapters, but never see an official English release, so fans would spend years of time translating them and posting them online. I believe one of the most well-known sites for this (wuxiaworld) has actually attained international recognition (ie. been in the news) for it, as well as signed an agreement with the major Chinese publisher of webnovels to continue translating in a legal manner.
Chinese wuxia novels are great. Vietnamese people call it "tiểu thuyết kiếm hiệp" here, the author 金庸 (Jin Young - Kim Dung) is someone everyone in Vietnam knows. They have to be among the most popular items people searched for when the Internet was slow and people went online to just read text.
We use a lot of Chinese phrases ingrained in us from Chinese novels, for example, I still remember vividly the word "ngụy quân tử" - 偽君子 - hypocrite, dishonest man - that is used in Chinese novels - that the journalist I talked about used to describe himself: "You might think I am a 'ngụy quân tử' when I said this to you, but I really really want you to continue. I didn't send the previous email to stop you. Don't stop."
We have a site called Việt Nam Thư Quán that has mainly Chinese wuxia novels. It is among the oldest sites in Vietnamese that is still operational today. It still has my Harry Potter translation version somewhere, I think. I wish I could read more Chinese novels for my own enrichment. Learning Chinese is my pipe dream that I will do... one day.
One thing good came out of it, so the indie translation on the book 5 made the 'blessed' translator work around the clock. She has to release her unfinished translations as they came out. She wasn't sure how to translate "The Order of Phoenix" and got it wrong for half of the book (order ~ the order came out of the phoenix's mouth) and then they had to change the translation halfway through (order ~ the group with hierarchy).
We were very quick to realize that was the wrong translation. I was surprised (and somewhat pleased/impressed) that the publisher/official translator didn't refer to what we did to avoid that mistake.
> At that time Vietnam has just signed the Bern copyright convention, and my indie translation was the center of attention. In the past book translation, we gave out our real names or real nick-names, however the translator wanted it. We had about 4-5 chapters churned out before we realized that we were in big troubles. I remember one night I received an email to my personal mailbox at 10 PM from a journalist asking something along the lines of "Do you know you're doing something illegal?"
What illegal thing were you doing? If Terry Brooks can translate Tolkien from English to English without running afoul of copyright, I don't see what copyright would have to say about translating from English to Vietnamese. You're certainly not infringing on the author's original wording.
Unauthorized use of a copyrighted work. Translations are included under the category of derivative works, and those have a requirement of lawfulness. They have to be somehow licensed or authorized from the copyright holder of the work they derive from.
The Shannara books were unoriginal, but not to a degree that they'd be considered derivative works.
> The Shannara books were unoriginal, but not to a degree that they'd be considered derivative works.
First, as far as I knew only the first book was unoriginal. But I'm certainly willing to believe others are unoriginal too.
Second, when nobody can read a book without noticing "hey, this is exactly the same story as this other book, but with different names", what's left that both
(1) distinguishes it as "not a derivative work", and
(2) doesn't also automatically apply to any translation into a foreign language?
I have seen it said many times that copyright will not protect ideas, only the particular form they have taken. Without a pretty gigantic loophole, those terms would provide absolute protection to a translation, which necessarily cannot use any wording from the original.
> First, as far as I knew only the first book was unoriginal.
Maybe. It's been a long time since I read the series. I remember getting to the third or fourth and realizing that the plots of later books also seemed to crib off the earlier ones.
(1) The story isn't exactly the same, just noticeably similar. The presentation is also significantly different, with a different premise for the setting and such.
(2) Copyright laws (Berne convention and US copyright law) specifically note translations as being afforded copyright separate from the original work, but falling under the "exclusive rights of authorization" that govern the original work.
The publishing house at the time bought the rights to translate JKR's work, so I think it's probably a gray area at best. I don't think people would make as big of a deal now as they did in the past, though.
It was novel - before the work done by the team, most websites in Vietnam only posted books retyped/digitalized by hobbyists, but no one other than the anime fans who did new translations. It was unsurprising to me to look back, many of the people who helped on the project were anime people. At one time we were having sister forums, Harry Potter and Anime.
Were the anime fans translating their anime from Japanese or English? If Japanese, did they work off of a Japanese translation of Harry Potter? Or was it mainly that anyone from the anime-translating community who could also understand English became interested in your project?
I was not involved in the Anime/Manga scene so I cannot say for sure, but from my understanding, the people who know Japanese and could translate it from Japanese were the minority. There was a blend of English and Japanese sources in the anime scene though. I don't know the exact mixture.
Definitely not for the Harry Potter case. The only source we had for Harry Potter was the English version. It took about 1 day for the English book to be scanned and appear online on KaZaA after the official book release, and leaked versions came up even earlier (but we don't know what was real, many were fanfics and viruses). All translated versions of any language other than English came way later, and as we wanted to consume the books as soon as they were released, English was the only choice.
I discovered Harry Potter series up until book 4 (The Globet of Fire) by renting books from a bookstore when I was 15. At that time, many Vietnamese kids were all eager for book 5 to come out. Except for when book 5, The Half-blood Prince came, we had to wait for it. We would have to wait for the "blessed" translator and the publisher to translate and churn out the whole book when a new book comes, and with all the proofreading it would take about 4-6 months. I decided that was too long and started posting on a quite popular forum my indie translation, then moved to my personal website. Being a 16-year-old having a summer break at that time, I had nothing better to do. My timetable was something like stay up all night to translate half a chapter, post the new translation, go to bed at 6 AM, wake up at 11 AM, the next day rinse and repeat. People loved it and many started contacting me to help with the translation. We had a YUUUUGE following to the point that I had to do nothing but just organizing and assigning who-does-what and then proofread it with my 16-year-old brain, but mostly we flew under the radar and it was easy. The complete translated book came out about 20 days after the English version. The normies still had to wait for the blessed book to read it, but anyone who had the Internet already read the whole story months earlier. People would bring A4-sized printouts to read at school and my older brother was asked more than once whether he knew the person who translated it from time to time.
Book 6 wasn't a happy story but a fun one. When book 6 came, I knew so much better that I knew to appoint someone that did the logistics for me. I did the fun part, code a website that allows us to automate the translation submission and make sure it can handle the traffic. At that time Vietnam has just signed the Bern copyright convention, and my indie translation was the center of attention. In the past book translation, we gave out our real names or real nick-names, however the translator wanted it. We had about 4-5 chapters churned out before we realized that we were in big troubles. I remember one night I received an email to my personal mailbox at 10 PM from a journalist asking something along the lines of "Do you know you're doing something illegal?" I was scared shitless and fucking deleted everything, thinking this is it - this is the end, and went to bed, not responding to the journalist. Then at 5 AM, not being able to sleep, I checked email again and the same reporter sent another email...
"I see that you deleted everything. This is totally not my intention. I won't rat you out. If possible, please let me know if we can do a secret interview. You might think that I am being dishonest but please trust me this time, I want you to continue what you are doing. I hope to see the new chapter coming out tomorrow."
I immediately removed all real names and asked everyone on the team to choose a nickname for themselves. I actually gave out my home address to the reporter and he turned out to be a hipster-looking student studying journalism writing part-time for a newspaper. We became good friends after that. Besides the interview, the translation at that time was so controversial that it sparked the discussion whether it is "right" or "wrong" to do on many online forums. I had google analytics at the time so I knew who was linking to the website. I registered a nickname just to talk my side of the story in one of them. It turned out that the admin of the forum was someone who studied in Princeton and three years later, when I dropped out of college, disheartened by what I saw and discouraged by what happened, he asked me to go study abroad. I would otherwise have never dreamt of doing that. Another online friend who is 40+ at that time asked me to work for him in the gap year, appointed me to his "vice-president" role of his company. The rest is just history. Thanks to the event and all that came after it, I knew probably 50% of all online friends that I admire and probably won't ever know otherwise.
By the way, when book 7 came out (when I was having my "gap year"), I decided not to do it anymore. It was too much to handle. Someone else I knew did it, though.