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Glad to hear that there are some authors who can make a living of their writing. Unfortunately, this mostly only applies to the English book market. I'm writing
by jonathanstrange 7y ago
Glad to hear that there are some authors who can make a living of their writing. Unfortunately, this mostly only applies to the English book market. I'm writing in German, where it is estimated that only a couple of hundred authors can make a living from writing novels. Moreover, science fiction is pretty much dead in Germany. People are reading English novels or translations thereof, which means less risk for the publishers and access to many great and professional authors.
- fastball 7y agoSo write books in English? What about German makes you want to write novels in German specifically?
- vonseel 7y agoMaybe he is German and the majority of his non-professional communication is in his mother tongue?
- taneq 7y agoMaybe it’s their native tongue?
- agota 7y agoI'm not the person you were replying to, but I'm also a writer, and I think you are underestimating the command of language required to write fiction. I'm fluent in English, I write in English for a living, but I doubt I'd be able to write decent fiction in English. "Just write novels in your second language, bro" comes off as extremely ignorant.
- fastball 7y agoLolita is considered one of the greatest books of all time. It was written by a non-native speaker in English. Thinking a non-native speaker can't write great English novels is the ignorant view, in my opinion. Is it difficult? Of course it is. But all writing is difficult.
- neffy 7y agoNot by anybody who has actually read it.
- fastball 7y agoDownvotes on HN for saying people think Lolita is great? Interesting.
- cafard 7y agoI beg to differ. I don't know that I'd rate it as one of the greatest works of all time--in the European/American world, there's what, three thousand years of recorded literature? However, I would have no trouble finding widely read folks who think very highly of it.
- dbuder 7y agoI don't know where you get that impression, it is an undeniable work of genius.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- _Wintermute 7y agoNabokov was raised bi(tri?)lingual, comparing him to someone who learned English as a second language isn't exactly fair.
- avn2109 7y agoAlso, Nabokov was an utter linguistic genius and extreme outlier all-around-literary-intellectual, so comparing to him is mostly unfair, period.
- vkazanov 7y agoVladimir Nabokov was a native speaker in both languages. he grew up with English-speaking nurses, governesses, etc aroun him... He also spoke French fluently, as all Russian nobility did. Additional fact: he learned to read in English first, Russian next. Not to mention his years in Cambridge, UK. TL;DR he probably spoke English better than most native speakers do nowadays.
- raverbashing 7y ago> "Just write novels in your second language, bro" comes off as extremely ignorant. Just as a note, it is not common but it does happen. Not to mention other forms of cultural production like songs (where adherence to grammatical norms is not as important as other forms of cultural manifestation). Which one is the "least correct" one, "Hotline Bling" or "I Want it That Way"? One was written by a native speaker, the other isn't.
- Iv 7y agoFor the same reason most English-speaking authors are not writing their books in Chinese.
- fastball 7y agoMost english-speaking authors don't speak a word of Mandarin. The OC obviously has a very solid grasp of English. If the comment had been written in German or broken English I would not have made the suggestion.
- Iv 7y agoFunctional English requires a very different level of mastery than writing literature in English. I am a casual writer in French, I consider myself almost fluent in English. I tried to write a short story in English during the last NaNoWriMo, it was incredibly difficult. I can explain in a lot of details why my C++ code is broken or the intricacies of a compiler inner parts. But I don't have as many words to describe a fence, as I have in French. In French I know how a farmer will call the place they put animals in and I know the official word that is the "correct" terminology. And I know which is which. It is very hard to find good translations of the tone behind this. That's a great learning experience, but being an author in one language while being fluent in another, does not mean you can easily write stories in both.
- jonathanstrange 7y agoI believe that for most people it is not possible to write good novels in a language in which you're not a native speaker. I wouldn't even dare to try, although my work language is English and all of my scientific publications are in English. Notice that literary translation is also usually from the foreign language into the mother tongue and almost never the other way around. Yes, there are notable exceptions like Vladimir Nabokov, but these are extremely rare and definitely not the rule.
- keiferski 7y agoJoseph Conrad would be the exemplar of this category, I think. English was his third language and he wasn't fluent in it until his twenties.
- fastball 7y agoNabokov wrote one of the greatest novels of all time in English as a non-native English speaker, and it's known especially for its turns of phrase. That is much more than a "notable exception". Additionally, the reason that there are so few "great authors" in the English-language non-native category is because there just aren't that many authors in that category. If he can do that, other people can write passable novels in English. It's not like you're writing the greatest novels of all time in German.
- Shaanie 7y ago>The family spoke Russian, English, and French in their household, and Nabokov was trilingual from an early age. He related that the first English book his mother read to him was Misunderstood (1869) by Florence Montgomery. In fact, much to his patriotic father's disappointment, Nabokov could read and write in English before he could in Russian.
- andrepd 7y agoWhy don't we all speak in English then, and be done. Linguistic diversity is an amazing beautiful incredible thing. There are things you can say in English that you can't say in German, and vice-versa, or Portuguese, or Swahili, or Mandarin, or Lojban. You'll forgive me for speculating that you don't speak more than one language, or you would appreciate that.
- criddell 7y agoWhat's something that I can say in English that cannot be expressed in German?
- andrepd 7y agoNo matter how good the translation of Lord of the Rings, it's never gonna be the same as reading the original English. The text is inextricably linked to the English language, the English countryside, a certain feel that cannot be entirely preserved in translation. It's probably not gonna be so bad in German, but in Italian? Forget it. 100 Years of Solitude is an absolute masterpiece. It's very difficult to put a finger on exactly why, but all agree there is a tone to it and to the way he tells the story, which usually people call "magical realism". The way it's so inexorably connected to a South American place and time, it's gonna be a different thing if you read it in English (credit though to the translators who do this incredibly difficult job in a stunning manner). The musicality and mood of the speech, for lack of a better description, cannot be accurately rendered in English. In short, it's more nuanced than "what's a sentence I can say in English that I can't say in German".
- ppseafield 7y agoTo provide a more literal response to your comment: there's no exact word for stain (as in: on clothing) in German. You can say Fleck, but it means spot in a more broad sense. Also, a date, in the relationship sense, has been imported. Verabredung is closeish, but more like an appointment. Likewise from German there's not a direct translation for Backpfeifengesicht, a 'face that is asking to be slapped', more literally 'face slap face'. Is there a more Englishy way to say Zeitgeist that captures the same meaning? You could replace it with "spirit of the time", but it feels a bit too general and clumsy. Is there a succinct English equivalent to Schadenfreude that isn't too long or clumsy?
- bloak 7y agoIt's probably best to write in the language you are most comfortable in (which, if you're an émigré, might be a language you acquired later in life) and get translators to translate it into whichever languages have a viable market for it. If you have a good understanding of some of those languages then you can even supervise the translation. You'll get a better result that way and it'll probably cost less, too, if you value your own time. Umberto Eco heavily supervised some of the translations of his books and has written about that process. He's rather a special case, of course: his books are not the easiest to translate even with the author's help.
- gherkinnn 7y agoAs it happens I prefer fiction in German. So please, do write more stuff in German.
- vonseel 7y agoMakes me wonder if Chinese writers face the same dilemma
- baud147258 7y agoThe Chinese-reading market is one order of magnitude bigger than the German-reading market.
- bilbo0s 7y agoThank you for that. It seems so many people skip the obvious in these debates. Comparing the situation of Chinese authors and artists to that of German authors and artists is not even apples to oranges, it's apples to skyscrapers. Obviously the Chinese authors have a captive market that, to be honest, no one even really knows the size of. We only know that it is at least 6x that of German authors. Not to mention Chinese cinema which frequently take their novels and make movies out of them.
- vonseel 7y agoOf course, but English is still the de-facto universal language in the Western world, and Chinese do consume lots of American television and music. It's still a valid question.
- Insanity 7y agoNot necessarily. Europeans often have enough understanding of English even when it isn't their native tongue to read English books. But in many countries translations are still a popular way to read. Many books in Mexico are translated into Spanish and people solely read translations. In markets where translating is the norm, writing in your native tongue is not a disadvantage. In other markets and areas (Germany and Belgium come to mind), where people prefer to read in the original language, it's a disadvantage.
- agota 7y agoI wonder how much of a role does Amazon's presence in the country play. I'm from Lithuania, I prefer to read in English, but that means that books are more expensive because I have to order them from Amazon UK or Amazon DE. Meanwhile, I imagine that for a German who prefers to read in English, there wouldn't be much difference between ordering an English book from Amazon DE and picking up a German translation in the local bookstore, especially if they have Prime.
- bloak 7y agoThat's cultural imperialism, I suppose. I'm guessing it's not really about the original language: those Swedish crime novels that sell well in English translation are also sold in German translation, right? But if the book doesn't appeal to UK/US readers then it won't get translated from German into French, say? (I'm just guessing: please correct me if I'm wrong.) The last German novel I encountered as a popular book in English translation was "Die Vermessung der Welt" / "Measuring the world". The first German science fiction that comes to my mind ... "Die Haarteppichknüpfer" (great book from 1995): no idea if it sold well in English. Science fiction, like crime fiction, seems like it ought to be something that crosses borders quite easily. So why doesn't it?
- riffraff 7y agothe existence of an english translation is useful to provide more local translations, but not a prerequisite, I believe. For example, Valerio Evangelisti (italian horror/fantasy/sci-fi/weird writer) has more translated works in french/spanish/german than he has in english, to my knowledge.
- jonathanstrange 7y agoSeems more like basic economics than 'cultural imperialism' to me. The German market is very small, the English market very large. This means that if you translate from German to English, you invest a substantial amount of money to get a book onto an already crowded market dominated by English authors. That's a huge risk for the publisher. If you cannot market the book well enough on the foreign market, you will loose money. Literary translations are not cheap. The other way around, if you translate a book from English to German, you can estimate very well from the performance on the gigantic English book market how it will sell in Germany. Bonus points if the author is already known in Germany anyway. The risk is lower than opening a program slot for a new German author (who would require additional marketing), and the cost of the translation is offset by the reduced risk. At least that's my explanation. Maybe I'm wrong about it, I'm not a publisher.
- andrepd 7y ago>Seems more like basic economics than 'cultural imperialism' to me. >The German market is very small, the English market very large. Yes, and the English market is so very very large because... :)
- acollins1331 7y agoSeems like a self imposed problem, because you could clearly just write in English.
- cameronbrown 7y agoYes, but it is a shame. German language (and others) shouldn't have to miss out on cultural growth just because English is more popular. Authors not being able to eat is a problem.
- riffraff 7y agonot to mention, writing in english means being unable to use a host of things that other languages have (and viceversa, of course).
- criddell 7y agoDo you think if there were more German language books being written, an audience for those books would develop? Is it just a chicken and egg problem?
- cameronbrown 7y agoDon't know. Seems like a lot of work to learn a language for a certain genre, but it's entirely possible. (I've been interested in learning Polish for this reason).