Over at MeWe, someone suggested to have the Naked Crow books translated into German.
Germany is a big country with lots of naturists, so there should be quite a market.
I had a look at translation services. Right, that was out of the window quite soon. Having one book professionally translated would cost between €5000 and €12000.
Making that worth the while, I’d have to sell between 8000 and 15000 copies of the translated book. (Worth the while as in breaking even.) Seeing how many copies of Naked Crow 1 have been sold in English, which is an even larger market, it’s unlikely that route will happen.
I can handle some German, so I started translating it myself. That taught me that writing a story in German is quite something else. Translating from English into German, while not being a native speaker of either language, is hard work. I plowed through almost 2 pages and asked a good German friend to see how good or bad it was.
She made 98 changes. In almost 2 pages. Naked Crow 1 is much longer than 2 pages.
Sorry, dear German readers. It’s not going to happen anytime soon.
Welcome to the wonderful world of translation! An unfortunate part of the problem is that the better you are at the languages, the more aware of potential minefields you are. It’s way too easy to get tied up in knots.
Personally, I think it’s worse when the languages are similar. I did a quick check and just sing/singen/singen or drink/drinken/trinken are disasters waiting to happen! I checked the Dutch conjugations and I’m like, “Oh, that one is like English and that one’s like German…… And there’s one the seems to be the two combined…… and there’s one totally unique.”
I commend you for even attempting two pages!
Thank you. It was very hard, indeed.