EA - Translating The Precipice into Czech: My experience and recommendations by Anna Stadlerova

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Translating The Precipice into Czech: My experience and recommendations, published by Anna Stadlerova on August 24, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. [This post is primarily meant for non-English speaking national EA groups who'd like to see translated EA-adjacent books (such as The Precipice) published in their countries. I felt especially motivated to write this after EAGxPrague, during which many people reached out to me and asked me about my experience as a translator of The Precipice into Czech. Please note that if your group is doing something other than a book translation, such as translating an article or other type of EA-adjacent non-literary text, different considerations might apply. I don't want to intimidate people by how complicated the process of book publishing might seem. In fact, I'd be happy to advise people on their translation projects. I am also drafting an online workshop for EAs who'd like to translate or publish translated content in their countries (see below and please contact me if you're interested).] Content summary: In late May 2022, The Precipice was published in the Czech Republic. I am the professional literary translator who translated the book into Czech. In this post, I describe the publishing process and outline other ways the project could have been organized.[1] I end with recommendations for publishing EA-adjacent books, which I think is the most useful part for my target readers. These considerations and recommendations should be taken as my subjective opinions, albeit based on some experience studying literary translation and working as a literary translator. In case you want the TLDR, my recommendations for those interested in publishing EA or EA-adjacent books are to: Find the right publisher Reach out to the publisher Create a group of people who will help the translator as they translate Get on one page with the translator (or find the right translator) Create a glossary of terms Proofread, proofread, proofread Get in touch with other EAs who have done some thinking about translation The process of publishing The Precipice [Note about terminology: In this post, I will be talking a lot about "literary translation", "literary translators" etc. Since I've noticed some confusion about this term, I'd like to clarify that "literary translation" means translation of both fiction and non-fiction books. The case of The Precipice, as a non-fiction book, also falls under "literary translation", albeit not under "translation of fiction". The distinction I often make here is between "literary translation" and "translation of other texts", such as articles, documents, leaflets, web content and all things non-literary.] Description of the process The Precipice was published in the Czech Republic by Argo Publishers, in a series called Crossover. More information about the series and the publisher is provided in the sections Find the right publisher and Czech literary market. For any translated book, fiction or nonfiction, in any decent publishing house (at least in the Czech Republic), here's how the process usually is: 1. The translator translates the book and submits it (usually using a word processing software such as Microsoft Word[2]). 2. The language editor reads the translation simultaneously with the original. Not only do they correct errors, they should also actively offer alternative phrasing and comment on the translation.They send it back to the translator. (Non-professionals are sometimes surprised by the quantity of the changes proposed by the language editor, so I thought it might be interesting to mention that even in a very good translation, it's absolutely normal to see ten or more proposed changes per page. I know this from my own experience as a translator and occasional language editor, as well as from many conv...