- cross-posted to:
- deutschland@feddit.de
- cross-posted to:
- deutschland@feddit.de
For those of us who are bilingual and want to self-publish books, I feel that there is a vast, untapped market for translating public domain works.
I translate old German folk tales and I know that @SimonRoyHughes@beige.party is doing the same for Norwegian folk tales. But who else here is active in the field, and what precisely do you translate?
And what are juicy things to translate other than folk tales?
#PublicDomain #Translation #amwriting
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Can’t say I have, but sounds very interesting - I’m very curious about Portuguese folk tales and history, and would like to translate into German and/or English. Where would I start with self-publishing, though?
There are a number of self-publishing platforms - Amazon KDP is the biggest, but there is also Draft2Digital, OneBookShelf, and a couple of others. You don’t necessarily have to publish exclusively at one single platform. If you publish in print, you will also need to provide a PDF document with the necessary layout (I use #TeXLaTeX for typesetting, but I don’t recommend it unless you already have experiences with it from an academic career ant the like), as well as a cover.
You also need public domain works that are available somewhere, preferably as digital download. I am very lucky in that there is an abundance of public domain German-language folk tale collections which I can use, but I don’t know what the situation is in Portugese. You could start with searching Archive.org, but if you want to do some serious research, I recommend looking at the citations of modern-day folk tale collections - they often use old sources which might be in the public domain.
(I’ve discovered a bunch of Italian-language folk tale collections which might be in the public domain this way, but that’s probably not much help to you.)
Portuguese folk tales and history
Look up Pedro I and Ines de Castro.
I live not too far from the village that was razed in revenge. Corpse brides never fail to attract, it’s a great story. I’m also really fond of the folk saints of Portugal - many of whom the Catholic church doesn’t officially recognize, but ultimately the people decide who gets worship.
Oooh! Does Portugal also have heretical prayers to Saint Christopher which compel him to bring you treasure?
We’ve got the Livro de São Cipriano, a witchcraft manual - in a country of ‘desenrascanço’ you just use whatever works to achieve your goals. Saints, witchcraft, or a bit of each. But for treasure you can also casually stroll around your local special boulder. The Moira might appear to you, or you find an entrance, and inside sits the Moira at a table. If your heart is pure she will give you treasure. The greedy will find that they brought home nothing but coal or rocks. The stories about Moiras appearing to peasants are so strikingly similar to the story of Our Lady of Fátima!
…we really need a “comparative folklore” group.
And enough people with expertise to join it.
folklore@mander.xyz - quite active recently, see you around there I hope!
I think “AI” is the newest player who takes old writings and makes them it’s own. It’s good to make some old things new again, but not all things. I think between the bible and Shakespeare all plots have been covered. Everything else is an iterative derivative plot with setting changes.
I am extremely skeptical that “AI” would do a good job with this. Old folk tales have a lot of local cultural, historical, and cultural context which the translator needs to take into account and explain. AI systems, in contrast, would turn this into a language they know best - which is largely Reddit posts of the last decade.
And the notion that “the Bible and Shakespeare have covered all plots” to be extremely reductive even for the English language. It gets rather insulting when you consider cultures outside of the Anglosphere, or “The West” in general.
@melsaskca @juergen_hubert you’re missing out on the literary traditions of everything outside the dead white male author western tradition. You should read literature by people outside that narrow demographic.
That’s a fancy statement and it sounds good. It’s quite general and not close to the truth at all, but it sounds good.
