> 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.
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.