Translating, Copyrights and Literature

For now I’m taking my multi-blogs and reducing it down to this one.

To start this I’m going to talk about copyright law. My biggest issue with the lengthened terms of copyrights in the United States deals with translation of works into other languages in relation to social relevance. Take this scenario:

I write a moderately succesful novel when I am about 35 years old. My publisher or I decide that we will retain the rights to translating this into other languages and do not translate it ourselves. I die 45 years later. Now, assuming someone in France is waitng for the copyright to expire 70 years after my death and immediately publishes a translation, and the translator just happes to be 35 at this time as well.(and similar people are around the world, translating), and also die 45 years after the translation. It would come into public domain in French 230 years later. 230 years ago, my great-great-great-great-great-granfather(7 generations back) was giving supplies to revolutionaries in the American Revolution.

By the time my novel arrives into public domain in other languages, it has lost significant relevance. You tell me, does this sound reasonably “limited”. Proponents of copyright extentions in the U.S. claim it’s up to congress to decide how to define “limited”, but my claim is there has to be reasonability, which is not the case. I even remember once reading someone suggesting it should last forever minus one day. This to me is scary.

The second factor with translations is the difficulty of creating quality translations. Many classic books that have been translated have multiple available translations, each having a different quality, if there is a licensed translation, there is only one quality available, which should be questioned.

Obviously I think there should be translation competition, as well as opportunity of the translators to communicate to the original author to understand their mind while retelling their story in another language, and while authors decide to be unaware of this issue in this, the supposed “Age of Information, but you can’t use it yet”, we will continue to not use a fraction of the potential of the technologies available. Movable type revolutionized the spread of information in the time of Gutenberg, while copyright laws try and take a step backwards.

With that said, if I ever write something, I plan to open it to translating, as long as the translator is willing to negotiate some sort of shared license between me and them, and in addition arrange for my works to move to completely open licenses when I die.

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