Based in Lebanon, Yasmina Jraissati founded Raya Agency to represent Arab authors and build more connections between international and Arab publishers.
German Buch News: Amazon Tops Ranking of Germany’s Online Stores; Court Rules for More Pay for Translators
By Siobhan O’Leary The German E-Commerce Center Handel (ECC) — a research and consulting firm focused on e-commerce — has released the results of its ECC Shopmonitor “image ranking” survey of online shops in Germany. As reported in the Boersenblatt, Amazon landed in the top position. The ECC asked 1,000 people representative of internet users to rate online shops on …
From “Cruel Hookah” to “Cruel Hooker”: A Cross-Cultural Conversation in Poetry
By Christopher Merrill IOWA CITY: The book Seven Poets Four Days One Book was an experiment to see what would happen if poets from different lands, languages, and generations tried to write together. The possibilities for failure seemed limitless — which perversely appealed to me. For it has been my experience that the least promising material may sometimes yield the …
What’s the Buzz: E-books Offer Hope for Translations; 40 E-readers Expected
By Hannah Johnson The best of the blogosphere and social media… Over at Three Percent, Chad Post of Open Letter Books has written a four-part essay on e-books and translations. But, anyone lucky enough to be attending this week’s Reykjavík International Literary Festival can see him present it in person. Post argues that, because the majority of translations published in the …
Global Trade Talk: Europeans Balk at Untranslated Google Settlement
By Siobhan O’Leary and Ed Nawotka The Börsenverein, along with numerous other European publishers, associations and international publishers, has put together a statement of objections against the Google Settlement. Buchreport.de summarizes the statement, which notes that the complicated 334-page Settlement was never made available in foreign languages for foreign class members to review. The objecting parties also point out that …
Turkish Publisher Selçuk Altun’s Second Act
By Edward Nawotka ISTANBUL: Selçuk Altun understands what it takes to market a novel. As the former executive chairman of YKY (Yapi Kredi Publications), one of Turkey’s largest and most prestigious publishers, he knew that if he wanted to bring his books to an audience outside Turkey, he’d have to do it on his own. So in 2007 he paid …
The Summer of Stieg: How Larsson Conquered Spain and Latin America
By Adriana V. Lopez MADRID: This past June, I boarded a plane at Madrid’s Barajas Airport bound for Bogotá, Colombia when I noticed several women on the plane with the same book. When you’ve worked in publishing, and by serendipity spot more than one person reading the same book in a public setting, and in one condensed space, it can …
Translation Nation: A State of the Union
Editorial by Chad W. Post ROCHESTER, NEW YORK: For years, people have speculated that the number of literary works in translation being published in the United States has been in decline. I say “speculate,” because the publishing industry — which is notoriously poor at market research and data gathering — didn’t really keep track of how many translations were being …
Bonus Material: The UAE’s Race to Translate
By Edward Nawotka One point on the globe where translation is booming is the United Arab Emirates. There, two translation programs, Kalima from Abu Dhabi and Tarjem from Dubai, have made it a race to see who can translate literary works the fastest and while maintaining the highest quality possible. The first out of the gate (ahem, this is the …
Clarice Lispector’s Biographer on the Thrill of the Hunt
By Benjamin Moser UTRECHT, THE NETHERLANDS — Nobody’s ugly at two a.m., so the t-shirt slogan goes. One evening a few years ago, I was sitting in my Dutch garden, talking to some friends about Clarice Lispector, the Jewish-Brazilian mystic writer. Having recently left the security of my publishing job in order to devote myself full-time to writing, I’d been …