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Friday 5 December 2008

Language barrier

Novelist Susan Hill - who, sadly, has given up blogging - e-mails about the problems of getting hold of work by authors who don't write in English:

With my publisher's hat on, I have several times looked into translating various novels but the cost of translation is very high, and then you have royalties on top as well as well as the usual production... I couldn`t justify it but many countries actually pay, via their Ministry of Culture, to have  books in their language translated into English by English publishers. This is the sort of thing that used to be done by Peter Owen, and Hamish Hamilton and Faber in their glory days. Now really the only firms doing translated books are Harvill, which does good foreign crime, and Gallic Books, who do French crime novels for which they get translation money.
The other problem is that a print-run of anything less than 1,000 is impossible - and Nobel or not, I bet I couldn't sell 1,000 copies of anything foreign. And though Maggie Drabble doubtless disapproves, I am actually in the publishing business to sell books. And even make money.

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