Obstacles abound in Indonesia'a book translation business

By Hermawan Sulistyo

JAKARTA (JP): Book publishing is always a gloomy business in the Indonesian industrial landscape. Only about 3,500 titles are published every year -- most of them school textbooks -- and only less than ten percent are "enlightening books".

Among these titles, translated works dominate and almost none of them were first printed over 3,000 copies. Year after year for over a decade, foreign works have dominated books of scholarly literature, novels and literary works.

Translated from their original works (mostly in English), they pose some complicated problems, both in technicalities and in substance.

Technically, publishers get some advantages from publishing translated books. They usually do not need to deal with individual authors. For an original manuscript, an author receives royalties ranging from ten to fifteen percent of the sale price for an originally published work. In contrast, a publisher who wishes to translate an already published work, only needs to pay between five and ten percent of royalties to the owner of the copyrights of the original work.

In the old days, many publishers hijacked foreign works. This year, Indonesia adopted the rules from the Bern Convention, which regulates intellectual copyrights. Law enforcement of articles in the convention has yet to be seen, but the adoption at least prevents further violations in obtaining copyrights for book translation.

For some years, some of Indonesia's big publishers have taken part in the Frankfurt book fair, the largest book fair in the world. With the adoption of the Bern Convention, Indonesian publishers should be in a better stance to deal with their foreign counterparts.

Copyrights owners are mostly the original publishers of a manuscript and sometimes are literary agents (it is a rarity that the author of an original work keeps the copyrights).

By dealing with a foreign publisher rather than individual authors, an Indonesian publisher would then have ample opportunity to secure some more potential marketable books. A series of contracts thus can be made in a more comprehensive fashion for bestselling books such as the works of John Grisham or Michael Crichton.

For scholarly works such as monographs which have a more limited readership, translation also fares well for Indonesian publishers. Many scholarly works, published mostly by research centers located within university systems, are released with a flat-rate system of payment rather than a royalties system. The respected Modern Indonesia Project at Cornell University, for instance, commonly hands over a copyright for a monograph with a flat-rate system for only US$150 to $250.

Translation projects for scholarly works have some other advantages. For various reasons, from philanthropic to political, many non-profit organizations and endowment funds happily subsidize these projects.

In developed countries, due to tax-related technicalities, there is a clear separation of function between a commercial publisher (more specifically called trade publisher) and a vanity press. The latter depends on endowment funds for its operation. However, unclear definitions of these two types of publishing houses in Indonesia provide some advantages for translation projects to be partially funded by endowments.

In general, seen from the perspective of Indonesian publishers, a translation project in book publishing can reduce overhead costs to some considerable percentage of the total production.

Yet, once a copyright is obtained, the problem starts. Finding a good translator is not an easy task. There are many good English readers around. But, to translate a book, let alone a scholarly work, one should also have mastered the writing skills in both languages.

A good English reader is not necessarily a good writer in the Indonesian language. Most, if not all, scholars who have mastered reading and writing skills have already occupied positions that would provide benefits unsurpassable by any of these translation projects.

A first class publisher in Jakarta pays at the most two dollars for a translated page. Working on six pages means that a translator would receive no more than $15. In contrast, the writer of an article of the same length published in a newspaper would be paid at least five times higher.

One would argue that writing an original article for publication or just for a seminar and other type of "workshop" is a more difficult task -- thus making the two products incomparable.

But we should not forget that those who have the mastery over both reading and writing in the two languages are always skillful enough to write original works. They are mostly scholars themselves, and they have surpassed the "stage" of only being "craftsmen" in translation projects.

A logical consequence of this situation is that translation projects are often left to be finished by those who are actually only second, third, and even fourth-tier translators. A finished product, then, is often only a second-class translated book. Muddled sentences, misinterpretation of terms and illogical paraphrasing as a result of misunderstanding the original work, are not uncommon.

Many publishers have recognized this problem. Unfortunately, the remedies are sometimes also illogical. Many publishers "hire" big names as translators, who in turn often "subcontract" their "employment" to second-tier translators.

With low quality translations, it is more difficult to sell books to a discerning readership -- leaving only non- discriminating consumers buying these books, many of whom are undergraduate students.

A known technique to avoid a low quality readership, which also means a shrinking market size, is that publishers ask a respected scholar to write an "introduction". To some degree, this strategy seems effective to widen the market. However, many readers may not be reading the translated book beyond this "introduction".

It could be argued that many Indonesian undergraduate students reaching the final stage of their study, will have problems producing a good quality thesis due to a lack of well-translated books in the market. This problem may also be aggravated by their advisors being too preoccupied to check thesis' sources or even a student's understanding of the subject. Within a generation of scholarship, we may find a less number of gifted future scholars.

This is a grim picture indeed. It is even worse if we look into the production figures of the biggest trade publishers, which show that translated books are still their main and best marketable productions.

A better picture is for the translation of novels. Technically speaking, translating a novel needs less language skills than translating a scholarly work.

In many cases, a publisher also provides better payment for a novel translation compared to a scholarly work due to its better business prospects. This explains why we see more and more translated novels around in bookstores.

Recently, in addition to novels, translated books are mostly in the fields of management, computer science, how-to-do or manual books and spiritual life.

On one hand, these translations seem to facilitate the educational roles assumed by translated books. But on the other hand, the increasing number of these types of books also indicates a lower quality of readership. A lower quality of readership now may, in turn, produce a new generation of readership mainly familiar only with these "second-class works".

Almost two decades have passed since the first proposals were voiced that the only solution to help the book publishing world would be through a determined political will.

One practical solution proposed by the Association of the Indonesian Publishers is a waiver of various taxes on book production. However, to the disappointment of many bookworms, the minister of education and culture has rejected this proposal.

The writer is a researcher with the Indonesian Institute of Sciences. He received his PhD. degree from the Scholarly Publishing Program, Arizona State University, United States.