TrekLit in Translation

[Etoile]

Forgive me if this has been asked/discussed before, but my searches throughout the forum haven't turned it up.

Is anyone familiar with how Trek novels are chosen for translation, and what languages they are translated into? I have very easily turned up a billion German translations, and Italian seems to have a good selection, too. There's a bit of Russian, very little in French, some Czech, a lot of Japanese but very little in the last 10 years...etc.

I know Star Trek is huge in Germany, but it's big in other places too. It's been broadcast in more than 48 countries, there are conventions worldwide that include Trek...so I'm surprised the novels don't seem to be as big around the world.

I'd love to hear more about this if anyone can fill me in. I know the board here is quite international too, so please tell me if I've got it wrong and you see plenty of it in translation near you. Thanks!

 

[Markonian]

I've been wondering whether there's some Trek in Russian translation but never found anything.

 

[Etoile]

There seems to be a bit here: http://www.livelib.ru/selection/6690

Those are all from the mid-90s, but there may be others out there. I wouldn't expect it made it into translation until the post-Soviet era, but there's definitely been a little bit since.

 

[Etoile]

Trying to do a little more digging on this myself. I did come across information on how books are translated in general, but of particular interest was an article from the Journal of American Culture: Translating Trek: Rewriting an American Icon in a Francophone Context. The abstract and first page available at that link; thanks to being in grad school, I was able to read the whole thing through my university.

The article focuses exclusively on the dubbing of TOS into Quebec French in the 1970s, not on TrekLit at all, but it raises the interesting point that literature in translation is necessarily literature interpreted. If a particular point won't translate well, sometimes the whole section has to be rearranged to compensate for how it is translated. Sometimes it's just skipped over altogether because it won't make sense to foreign viewers (or readers).

Which only raises a further, more bizarre question for me. Is German the most common language for TrekLit in translation not only because Trek is popular there, but because English is a Germanic language and thus easier to translate? Hmm...only somewhat kidding, really...!

I did also find this old thread about the same topic, but it hasn't been touched in over four years, so I don't feel too bad for starting this one!

 

[Marika]

In Italy they stopped translating the books since 2000. None of the re- launch books were translated because the freaking publishing houses think doesn't worth their money . The 2 known publishing houses closed their doors in late 2000 and with them any chance of seeing italian translated books went down the hole. It's sad because in Italy there is a good ST community and a lot of them don't speak english and because of that they are kept outside the business to say so.

 

[Etoile]

I wonder if there have been fan translations of TrekLit. It's definitely big for other media - fansubs of Hollywood movies and anime, fan translation of video games, scanlation of comics and manga. I know Harry Potter was often fan translated well in advance of the official translations. Perhaps someone has done it for TrekLit...it introduces a host of legal problems, though - Harry Potter fan translators have gotten everything from C&Ds to arrests.

I did manage to find the "Countdown to Darkness" comic in French (Compte à rebours avant les ténèbres) available on Amazon, but that's it so far for currently-available French TrekLit.

 

[Marika]

Yeah, the non authorized translations can be a legal problem that's for sure because other wise i would start translating the trek books in italian just for fun :P

 

[8of5]

I've never come across Russian ones before, cool. In addition to the German, Czech, French, and Japanese, there have also been some Spanish, Portuguese (from Brazil where Trek is pretty big), and Hebrew translations (the earliest Hebrew covers were glorious).

In recent years there are definitely quite thin pickings, several countires have picked up a few of IDW's comics (mainly nuTrek stuff), but the only ongoing prose publishers I know about at the moment are the German and Czech ones.

 

[tomswift2002]

With the first Hebrew book, the translation of James Blish's first book, what's up with the Hockey player on the cover?

 

[Etoile]

Hah, I love those first four Hebrew covers!

I really wonder how it gets decided, though. The main reason I read tie-in anything is because I'm not getting what I need from the property itself. With Trek, I'm not getting anything at all, and TrekLit fills the void. So whoever is responsible for getting it into translation, they just figure...people in other countries don't want any more Trek, or what? I can't imagine that's the actual thought process, but I sure do wonder what it is.

 

[Markonian]

The German publishers are actual Sci-Fi fans, including Trekkies. They put as much TrekLit on the market as economically possible but had to scale back at some point - NuTrek Academy was cancelled and the ENT-Relaunch went into hiatus temporarily.

The reason is that there are only so many Trekkies. Only some of them read TrekLit. Only some of those read TrekLit in translation. We're talking of the fraction of the fraction of a franchise's fandom.

 

[8of5]

I imagine the costs are a big factor too. It's not unusual for UK publishers to print certain Star Trek books for the market here. For which I'm sure they have to pay something to someone for use of that content - I have no idea how the chain works, but their are creator royalties, licensee fee for use of Star Trek, and maybe buying content off the company that first produced it?

I assume the same fees are required by publishers in other countries, but then they have to factor in the cost of translation too, so either they whack up the price of the book to cover their extra costs (and risk putting off customers with a more expensive product), or they absorb that cost and make less per book - Although, I wonder what translation costs? Surely hiring an author to produce entirely new content in whatever language is more than hiring a translator to convert an existing work?

There are also different interests in different markets. Star Trek licensing in general is currently dominated by TOS, but when it comes to books at least, TOS is quite a minor part of what Cross Cult offer in Germany.

 

[Defcon]

There are also different interests in different markets. Star Trek licensing in general is currently dominated by TOS, but when it comes to books at least, TOS is quite a minor part of what Cross Cult offer in Germany.

And the little TOS they're doing is losing them money, hence why the last three TOS releases where actually unused translations from the time when Heyne was still the publisher in the early ´00s, as buying those old translations is cheaper than having books translated themselves for CC.

The next regular TOS release (I coun't the Khan books more as "event books") is a relatively new one, though (No Time like the Past), so I guess that will be the test to see if TOS books are viable for Cross Cult.

 

[Gul Re'jal]

I think I've seen one of the novelizations (probably "The Undiscovered Country") one an e-Bay-like online auction in Polish, but it's been a while, so I could be mistaken. If there were any books in Polish, not many. Trek is usually confused with Star Wars in that country (that's how "popular" it is) by non-fans, so the market to bother with a translation and publication is too small.

I don't think I've ever seen any Trek fiction in Chinese, but my not seeing one in a bookshop doesn't mean lack of existence. My friend has a few non-fiction books in Chinese, but I am not sure whether they're translations or some original work on the subject. I'm not very familiar with non-fiction in Trek in any language.

 

[tomswift2002]

- NuTrek Academy was cancelled

Well that series was also cancelled in English (after 4 volumes), so I'm not to sure how far CC got, but obviously it wasn't that popular anywhere.

As for "No Time Like The Past", considering that one has Seven Of Nine in it, Cross Cult could brand it as a Star Trek Voyager novel if the TOS line is not as popular as the Voyager line in Germany.

 

[Etoile]

I don't think I've ever seen any Trek fiction in Chinese, but my not seeing one in a bookshop doesn't mean lack of existence. My friend has a few non-fiction books in Chinese, but I am not sure whether they're translations or some original work on the subject. I'm not very familiar with non-fiction in Trek in any language.

With some dexterous searching, I was able to determine that the TMP novelization made it into Chinese in 1980, translated by "Warner," and from Xinhua Publishing House. Although Infinite Space was the name of the movie in China, the book is apparently just called Star Trek. That's all I got...

 

[Masiral]

I think I've seen one of the novelizations (probably "The Undiscovered Country") one an e-Bay-like online auction in Polish, but it's been a while, so I could be mistaken. If there were any books in Polish, not many. Trek is usually confused with Star Wars in that country (that's how "popular" it is) by non-fans, so the market to bother with a translation and publication is too small.

To be fair, plenty of people in the US confuse Star Trek and Star Wars, too.

 

[loghaD]

To the best of my knowledge, there are no Star Trek novels that have been translated into Swedish.

I suspect there isn't much of a market for them. Star Trek has never been huge here (even though there are certainly a decent number of dedicated fans), and the target audience for these books is mostly adults, who are expected to have a good command of the English language anyway.

Furthermore, even if they were to be translated into Swedish, many fans would still prefer to read these books in English, because

1) books are usually best in their original language

2) Star Trek has never been dubbed into Swedish, so reading a Star Trek novel in Swedish may feel a bit unnatural

However, there have been a handful of Star Trek comics translated into Swedish.

According to that site, there have been 12 translated comic books in total:

7 TOS comics by Marvel (published by Atlantic Förlag, 1981-1982)
3 TMP comics by DC Comics (published by Epix, 1992)
2 TNG comics by DC Comics (published by Atlantic Förlag, 1993)

The 7 TOS comics were also printed in Norwegian.

As it happens, I own all 12 of these

I actually prefer reading/watching most things in the original language if I can, but I'm also very keen on translated comics from the 20th century, particularly the '60s, '70s and '80s. It's neat to see how much language has changed in such a short time, and how people wrote things back when we were less reliant on English.

 

[Christopher]

^Good grief, they called the series "Spock"? Nobody tell Shatner!

I'm reminded of the way that, even though the creators of the comic book Big Hero 6 chose a name that they felt would have a Japanese flavor, the actual Japanese name for the movie version is Baymax.

 

[loghaD]

^Good grief, they called the series "Spock"? Nobody tell Shatner!

Hehe, yup. Even though Star Trek has never been huge here, and most people couldn't tell a Vulcan from a Klingon, Spock is iconic and widely recognized, so maybe they figured it'd attract more attention that way.

There are also some indications that they were trying to create a fan club woth a Vulcan mascot, but the series was cut short by a legal dispute before they even got to he fourth issue. Would be interesting to see where that might have led...