Sagen – Wikisource
de.wikisource.org

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

  • Jürgen Hubert@literature.cafeOPEnglish
    5·
    7 days ago

    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.)