Translation Alternatives to Babelcube

by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig

Last year I started branching out into translation.  At the time, the main platform I found to support royalty-sharing translation (no upfront costs to the author…the author and translator share the royalties for the project) was Babelcube.  Babelcube has definitely been around the longest, but there are some problems with the platform.  In particular, I wasn’t happy with their distribution/ sales channels and the exclusivity in their terms of service (my Spanish translator, Alfredo Moyano, was interested in creating an audio version of Dyeing Shame in Spanish and the ToS didn’t allow us to pursue it, although Babelcube doesn’t have its own audio platform).  More about my thoughts on Babelcube in this post. 

I knew the terms of service going in, and wasn’t happy from the start…but I couldn’t find any other options.  Another translator I’m working with proposed a collaboration where I would act as publisher and distribute the book and pay the translator after receiving royalties.  However, I wasn’t very comfortable with that.  I was fine with handling the distribution (we would have gone very wide, since that’s what I’m accustomed to), but I didn’t want to be in charge of distributing funds.  For one, it was going to be a timesuck to take screenshots of earnings on all the platforms. For another, I had concerns about the tax implications.  Plus, I wondered what kind of a mess I’d be leaving for heirs if I were to be hit by a train tomorrow.

I bugged people on forums and in groups asking if blockchain had gotten to the point where translators and I could easily divide up earnings automatically.  From the lack of response I got to this question, I came to the understanding that either the tech isn’t there yet, or that writers weren’t aware of it, if it was.

This leads me to the alternatives that I’ve finally discovered.  One of them, TraduzioneLibri ( TekTime), was pointed out to me by Mark Williams, who runs the always-helpful Facebook group International Indie Authors (you must ask permission to join).  It’s an Italian company, but now has an English-facing site.  The distribution is much better than Babelcube’s (and does include audio) and so are its terms of service.  I’m now in the process of hopping over there from Babelcube with my Spanish translator.  More on their agreements/ToS here.

Additionally, there’s a cool collaboration feature on the site BundleRabbit.  Although most writers might be familiar with BundleRabbit as a way of bunding books into ‘box sets,’ they have a collaboration portal for writers interested in co-authoring (or, in my case, working with a translator).  My German translator,  Theresia Fink, first mentioned it to me, and I read more about it on Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s excellent site.  The ToS for BundleRabbit is here.   I’m used to reading these service agreements at this point, but for some reason, I stumbled through this one and needed clarification.  I asked for it through the site’s contact form and got an almost immediate response from the site’s creator, himself.  Chuck Heintzelman wrote: “BundleRabbit only has the right to publish the assets you upload to the sales channels (Amazon, Kobo, CreateSpace, …) you specify. You control this…You are 100% free to publish any project you publish on BundleRabbit any where, in any form.”

I’m excited that there are more viable options for royalty-sharing in translation.  I’ll update you more after I’ve had some books published on these sites.

Photo credit: miez! on Visualhunt.com / CC BY-NC-SA