1. SapereAude

    SapereAude Contributor Contributor

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    Second language editing

    Discussion in 'Self-Publishing' started by SapereAude, Feb 20, 2022.

    Background: My late wife, who died eight years ago, was from South America. We married late in life and she never became fluent in English. One of the consequences of that was that she wasn't happy attending church in our town, because the mass was said in English and she couldn't follow it. So we attended a church in a nearby city where they had a Spanish language mass. As a result, we became friendly with the Latin American assistant pastor.

    Since my wife's death I have remained friendly with the good padre, and we meet for lunch every few weeks. Currently, he is writing a book (in Spanish), and I'm doing my best to help him translate it into English. Recently, the padre suggested that I should turn some of my books into Spanish. I just bought a block of 100 ISBNs from R.R. Bowker, so I have ISBNs to burn. Why not give it a try? Or so I thought.

    My problem is that I'm not fluent in Spanish. To assist the padre with his manuscript, I've been using a computer translation program. It's good, but not perfect. The saving grace going from Spanish to English is that I can clean up the result to fix where the program goofs. My Spanish isn't up to the task of cleaning up the machine translation going from English to Spanish. I have been using a free version of the translation software, and it seems to randomly switch (sometimes in the same paragraph) from the "familiar" form of address to the "formal" form. In the paid version, the user can choose which form to use, but that's not an option in the free version. The paid version is by subscription; it's expensive ... and as a matter of principle I don't do software by subscription.

    I can find translators on the Fiverr web site, but I don't really need a translator. What I need is more like a very light edit, just to skim through and clean up the translation to ensure that it's grammatically correct (which it probably is -- it's a GOOD program) and, more importantly, to ensure that the text isn't a muddle of the familiar and the formal forms.

    Where would I look for someone to do that, and what should I expect to pay for a book that's slightly over 50,000 words?
     
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  2. Catriona Grace

    Catriona Grace Mind the thorns Contributor Contest Winner 2022

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    No answer to your question, but, wow. Good on you for tackling a monumental task. I practice my written Spanish by translating Spanish language books paragraph by paragraph, and that's difficult enough.
     
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  3. SapereAude

    SapereAude Contributor Contributor

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    Update: As I got deeper into the second of the two books the pastor encouraged me to publish in Spanish, I discovered a couple of bells and whistles in the software that made the translation better and the task easier. Both books have now been fully translated, and published through Amazon KDP, Barnes and Noble Press, and Draft2Digital (the latter as e-books only).

    If anyone needs something translated, the program I used is called DeepL: https://www.deepl.com/translator

    IMHO, it's head and shoulders better than Google Translator or Bing Translator.
     
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  4. Friedrich Kugelschreiber

    Friedrich Kugelschreiber marshmallow Contributor

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    deepl is excellent
     
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  5. MarcT

    MarcT Active Member

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    Good for you for completing this task and I'd be interested to know how readers and native Spanish speakers feel about the translation. Does it convey the author's style and nuance, for example?
    I live in South America (Argentina) and need my book translated into Spanish. I tried a couple of online programs (not Deepl), considered Babelcube, tried a bilingual friend but he made it all too literal and finally found a professional translator who ended up doing a first class job.
    I speak and write Spanish but not 100% natively and my wife who is Argentine, read the translation and she was more than impressed. It was important that the local slang was used, which a machine could never do.
     
  6. SapereAude

    SapereAude Contributor Contributor

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    I will be meeting the good Father for lunch on Saturday and I'll present him copies of the Spanish books, since he was the reason I did it. It may be awhile, though, before I get a reaction. The larger of the two books was read by a Mexican friend, who pronounced the DeepL translation (with my corrections) to be "good to go" -- so I went.

    DeepL offers a choice between Portuguese and Portuguese (Brazilian). However, for Spanish it only offers Spanish. Since they are headquartered in Europe, I have to assume it's Spanish as spoken in Spain. My late wife was from Chile, and I know enough to know that Chilean Spanish is different from Peruvian Spanish, which is different from Bolivian Spanish, which is different from ... The predominant Latino population around here is comprised of Ecuadorians, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, and lesser numbers from Guatamala and then a few from the rest of the countries in South America. You can't possibly be spot on for all of them, so my goal was to use Spanish that they can all read and understand. Given rivalries between and among some South American countries, I decided that using European Spanish (the mother tongue) was probably the safest approach.

    We'll see.
     

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