Illegal poetry

January 7, 2009 9:07 AM

Can translating literary works over the internet get me arrested?

Say I want to start a blog where I translate selected poems, short stories, and small extracts from novels from English into another language where no translation of said works exist. Am I doing something illegal?

What if translated version(s) of a piece do exist in that language, can I re-translate parts of it and post them?

posted by howiamdifferent to law & government (12 comments total)

1. You can translate and publish out of print texts without permission.
2. You can translate pretty much anything with necessarily "publishing" it.
3. Copyright violations are civil--not criminal--actions.
posted by mattbucher at 9:12 AM on January 7

Wasn't there a guy for translating Iranian stuff, under a Patriot Act provision against trading with the enemy?
posted by orthogonality at 9:15 AM on January 7

If the work is under copyright, then that is very probably illegal, regardless of whether a prior translation exists or not. (Although for "small extracts" of novels, very small extracts, say a few sentences, may be permissible as fair use, but fair use is a very grey area of the law. Anyone who tries to tell you there is a hard and fast limit—x% of the whole or y words or z sentences—below which the usage is guaranteed to be fair use does not know what he is talking about.)

You can translate and publish out of print texts without permission.

This is incorrect.
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 9:17 AM on January 7 [1 favorite has favorites]

It probably won't get you arrested, but it is illegal, and could get you sued something ugly. Foreign publication rights are something usually gained by a publisher in their contract with the author, but if they're not, then it's a right retained by the author. Usually they'll then be sold to a foreign publishing company, assuming there is any money to be made in publishing the work elsewhere. Regardless of whether or not there is, most publishers and authors aren't going to care much for you giving away their works for free, whatever language it might be.

By and large, if you'd be violating copyright law by posting the work in its native language, you'd be violating it by translating and posting it as well. If you want to do this, I'd recommend sticking to public domain works, such as those on Project Guitenburg. There's no guarantee you'd be caught, of course, but it's a silly thing to risk.

The other thing you could try doing is contacting the author, or, if the author is unavailable (read: dead) the publishing company that owns the copyright, and asking for permission. Many authors, I suspect, would be happy to give you permission to do short excerpts.
posted by Caduceus at 9:19 AM on January 7

You will not get arrested, but you could get sued.

The concept of "fair use" (e.g., translating a small bit of a larger work) may vary from country to country, both in its interpretation and its existence. If where you live has fairly liberal fair-use interpretations, but the publisher of the work is in a country that does not...well, I don't know how that would work, actually (IANAL). At the very least, you might hear from your ISP and from the author's/publisher's attorneys.
posted by rtha at 9:19 AM on January 7

Sorry I meant public domain (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain#United_States_law) not out of print. when are we getting that 3:00 edit feature??
posted by mattbucher at 9:21 AM on January 7

I have nothing to add about fair use and attribution, but I would like to ask why you want to publish your translations on the web. Is it because you would like to popularize unknown writers? If so, it's always better to offer help to people who ask for it. If no one is asking for help popularizing their work in English, then there is no reason for you to publish it on the web, and you need to ask for permission first.

If you're just trying to hone your translation skills, then you don't need to publish on the web.
posted by KokuRyu at 9:33 AM on January 7

I would like to ask why you want to publish your translations on the web. Is it because you would like to popularize unknown writers? . . . If you're just trying to hone your translation skills, then you don't need to publish on the web.

Strangely enough, some people actually like to read things, so the unmentioned option is: so people who do not speak English have the opportunity to read this great poem/excerpt/etc.

But yes, this sounds like a big bundle of copyright infringement. Remember, though, that copyright legislation is not a blanket prohibition on copying -- it's just a bundle of rights granted to the author of a creative work... rights which they are free to hand out. So find a nice collection of things you'd want to translate, send out a bunch of emails, and go ahead with whatever you get permission to do.
posted by toomuchpete at 9:51 AM on January 7

It doesn't hurt to ask the author but I suspect even a sympathetic author would likely say no for various rights and contract reasons, even if you were translating to a language that the work would be unlikely to ever be translated to.

But that's for professional published work by professional authors. There is a vast amount of amateur work published online, ranging from original prose and poetry to fanwork based on popular books, movies, and television shows. Some of it can be of very high quality and the authors are much more likely to be willing to have their work translated (of course you should still ask). The downside is finding the really good stuff since the bar for entry is very close to zero. You'll have to sort through a lot of chaff.

Or maybe you've got a language with a dearth of literature, at least popular works translated from English, so perhaps you could look into setting up a traditional publishing company for that language, with the goal of legitimately working with authors to bring their works to that language. Do you think there's a real market?
posted by 6550 at 10:36 AM on January 7

You asked three questions. Here are three answers:

1. Almost certainly not, if you take even the simplest precautions. Being anonymous on the internet is pretty easy; the MPAA hardly ever even manages to arrest people for movie distribution, and they pour more money into trying to stop piracy in a day than I'd bet publishers do in a year. (To say nothing of the difficulty of tracing a .txt file.)

2. Almost certainly yes. Of course, question 1 mitigates a lot of the immediate consequences to this. (A good additional question would be "Is this ethical?" which would be a much more ambiguous territory than either of these questions.)

3. Depends. Is there a common turn-of-phrase in a novel that you think is incorrectly translated? Then there's not a court in the land that would mind if you wrote a blog urging people to substitute your words for the other translator's. But, say, uploading a Finnish translation of half of Gravity's Rainbow because you think the ending didn't quite grasp what Pynchon was getting at probably isn't allowed.
posted by Damn That Television at 12:28 PM on January 7

3. Copyright violations are civil--not criminal--actions.

Assuming we're talking about the US...

Not exactly. Copyright violations may be either civil or criminal, depending on the circumstances. It's my understanding that if you profit by your infringement, it's pretty easy for them to decide it's a criminal matter. From that article, the criterion is very broad: "willfully and for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain." So, you don't actually have to sell the work, so long as it's giving you a commercial advantage. If you're copying for your own personal use, and not distributing, then you're probably pretty safely in civil territory.

But, if you're distributing copyrighted work (or derivative works thereof), and you're gaining any sort of commercial benefit from the distribution, you could be charged criminally. That would probably result in arrest, even if you were out on $5 bail in twenty minutes.

What you propose to do falls squarely within copyright violation, whether criminal or civil depends on whether you profit by it. A translation is very explicitly a derivative work. And you cannot create a derivative work without the permission of the rights holder. It's irrelevant if another translation exists; the original exists, and you are copying and transforming it.

As for getting permission from the rights holder: no publishing house is going to give it to you (if they bought that right), and precious few authors will give it to you. If an author is publishing work under a standard "All Rights Reserved" license, and getting paid for it, (s)he's probably not going to want to give up the possible revenue stream of reselling the work for a foreign language market... even if that's not really going to happen.

I don't know your goal... but, if you're trying to become a pro translator, I'd find a publishing house to work with. If you're just trying to bring the works of Terry Pratchett to Thailand, then do it anonymously and accept the risk--or not, because it's kind of unethical on top of being illegal.
posted by Netzapper at 1:31 PM on January 7

You could be arrested if what you translated and published was considered hate speech or obscene.
posted by JonB at 10:55 PM on January 8