The fan-translations for Scroogled (my Creative Commons-licensed story from Radar Magazine in which I ponder "the day Google became evil") keep on rolling in — this week, there's been two Italian translations (one from Reginazabo, the other from Decio Biavati), a Portuguese one from Carlos Martins, and a Latvian translation from the Bar Camp Baltics folks. (Previous translations include Buglarian, Dutch, French, German, Macedonian, Persian, Polish, Russian and Spanish).
As an added bonus, the Italian magazine Delos Science Fiction has just posted Stefano Bonora's Creative Commons-licensed translation of my award-winning story When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth.
It's great to see such an emergent community of translators who are using their linguistic skills to make English-only works available in other parts of the world. I've done some amateur translation from Spanish, but it's hard to keep the motivation up when you're only working for yourself (as is necessarily the case when you're working with traditional copyright). The "derivatives-friendly" Creative Commons licenses allow amateur translators to share the fruits of their work, get friendly feedback, collaborate and gain reputation, encouraging them to do more and more work.
Now, if only more non-English works would be translated for us Anglos! Everywhere I go, I meet non-English-speakers who've read English writers in translation, as well as French, German, Russian, Japanese, etc — lots of stuff gets translated out of English, but precious little comes to us, leaving us monolinguals with no choice but to live the provincial life of someone who can't compare their native literature to those of other lands.
Link to Scroogled in Italian (Reginazabo),
Link to Scroogled in Italian (Decio Biavati),
Link to Scroogled in Portuguese,
