These days I’ve been pretty active translating a variety of Japanese novels (in part or in full) to English and posting them on my blog. Whether the original work is published online somewhere or with paper media, I highly recommend getting the author and (if applicable) publisher’s permission before you post anything translated online, even if it just a personal blog.
Over the last year or so I’ve contacted several authors (10+) and gotten their permission, and my success rate is pretty good (80-90%). I have gotten questions from several readers about how to go about asking authors for permission, so I thought I would write an article describing the process.
Keep in mind that a majority of these are novels or short stories that are published freely on sites like Kakuyomu or Shouetsuka ni narou, and I am not aiming to make any money off these translations. If the original work was published through a proper publishing company, and/or my intent was monetary profit, I think the process would be much more involved and probably require negotiation and possibly even filling out certain types of paperwork. But I’m just going to keep things simple here and assume you are talking to an author of a freely available story and you are not trying to make money.
Before I show you a sample email template (based off an email I have sent recently), I want to emphasize that in my experience a majority of authors who have not formally published are happy to have their work translated and published, even in an informal way like on a blog. However, there are a few reasons your request may be declined, for example if they are planning to publish their work in more formal media, like a printed literature magazine such as this.
While you could do this via a few smaller emails back and forth with the author, to save both your time and the author’s I suggest sending one longer email to try and lay out all the key points at once. These include:
- The reason you want to translate their work (For translation practice? Because you think it’s well-written?)
- That you will not be making any money off the translation
- That you will give them proper credit
- The location you will be publishing it (link to your blog, etc.)
In terms of the Japanese you use, while I have noticed a tendency for certain mistakes made by non-native speakers to be forgiven, at minimum you should use basic polite forms (です・ます), and always use the proper name suffix (さん). If you are comfortable with more advanced 敬語 (like 「いらっしゃる」) feel free to use these, but steer away from using expressions you haven’t seen used by a native speaker.
Since you should have a certain level of fluency before posting translations online, I am not going to translate each sentence of the template email here. I’ll just highlight the parts you should fill in yourself, mad-lib style.
Email title: 「[Full name of work you want to translate]」の英訳の件
初めまして。[Your name]と申します。
Keep in mind this is just a template to get you started. Rather than cutting and pasting my own template, instead I write these emails by hand each time and add various things depending on the situation. For example, in one case I added that I had discovered a website created by the author to show my interest.
Please be aware that I will not claim the above email template is 100% native-level, natural Japanese. There are probably some areas that can be refined. But I have used similar emails successfully several times.
If you don’t get a response in a few days, say a week, then you can ping them again. In a recent project of mine, the author didn’t respond after a few days and I pinged him via another mechanism (Twitter), whereby he gave me permission after a brief chat.
If you get turned down, don’t take it too hard and just move on. The only exception would be that if you feel the author misunderstood something you said (maybe you didn’t communicate it clearly enough), in which case you can give more details and tell them if they change their mind to please contact you anytime.
If you do get permission, be sure to send them an email containing a link to the translation once you publish the first chapter (and maybe subsequent chapters as well). You may also be able to ask them to link to your translation in the description (or some other place) on the page containing the original work.
I’ve recently delved into translating for practice, but I have no idea whether I can upload non-profit translations of otoge onto my blog. I’ve seen several blogs who “summarize” what goes on by extensively summarizing each sentence (much like a book), rather than upload a direct translation. In this latter case, would this be a good idea? I have also seen many bloggers upload their own translations for visual novels with no intent to make money (although they do accept donations in general). I’d love to go about doing this the right way, but being that translation and creative license in and of itself can be a bit murky, I’m not too sure what that way is. Regardless, I’m happy to be getting the practice that I am.
Hello, thanks for the question!
There are two issues here:
1) Is it illegal to translate and/or summarize something and put it on an online blog for non-profit reasons
2) Will you likely get some form of legal action (i.e. sued) due to said behavior.
For the first item, I think the law is pretty clear: if you translate content that is copyrighted and post it on a public place, for any reason, it is illegal. If there is associated conditions with the copyright (ex: “you may post short excerpts for review purposes), you may have a little leeway there, however. Summaries are also a little gray, but since some of the content is still there (in some form) then I think you could be doing something illegal.
For the second, things are more gray. If you are doing something for non-profit and with no bad intent, you are less likely to get in trouble. It also depends on the stance of the rights holder (author, publisher, etc.). But this is just a guess, you can never know what they will do.
Keep in mind that things like summaries can still prevent people from buying the original book. Also, even if there isn’t a translation now, there could be one at a future point, and then your translation is more likely to effect sales. Also, even if you say “I will take this translation down if anyone copies it”, once someone copies it you cannot stop what they do with the material. They could even try to sell it.
I am not a lawyer so please do not take any of this as official, but my recommendation is to be as safe as possible.
If you need helping finding legal things to translate I can help with that (:
Also, check out this article of mine: http://selftaughtjapanese.com/2019/02/01/fiction-curation-for-translation/