Babelcube

I’ve joined Babelcube early this year, while I was still giving English classes.

It is a relatively new company which operates mostly online, where indie authors and translators from practically everywhere in this world meet for interesting partnerships. The contracted payment for book translations there is based on the sales performance the respective works will attain. I found it a very good idea. Then I joined both as a translator and as an author. My book Poesia Amadora, which I wrote in Portuguese, includes a short sample of translation. There is a page originally written in Portuguese by one of my brothers. I find said page beautiful then I translated it both into English and into French. Now my book is being offered to fellow translators from anywhere for translation into any language. Apparently no one has wanted to do this translation up to now, but translating poetry is really something difficult and no translator should ever wish to get either rich or famous by translating my book. I can understand this universal rejection my book is getting, since I don't feel like translating myself it into any of my languages, despite all freedom of expression I would enjoy under such circumstances. The number of poetry books I’ve at the site is small and that of translations for poetry is smaller still.

I’ve been a translator by trade since 1985. In such a capacity I have already translated practically everything thinkable all along, like technical stuff of almost all kinds, material for internal use in great companies, academic stuff, and so on, including some books.

My average of books translated per year was zero dot something until last year, before I found this interesting possibility, since in thirty full years I had translated, in all, less than thirty books, some of which I never knew whether they have been published or not.

After finding Babelcube, everything changed.

Hitherto, I’ve already signed seven contracts for book translation with them, five of these I have already translated, four of which have already been published, and three of them were rated with five stars by their respective authors.


My very first translation there was an American work titled How to Publish Your Book, by Justin Sachs that I translated into Portuguese. It is an interesting book full of useful tips for writers, like how to write a good query letter to publishers and a lot more. Especially interesting for indie writers who intend to reach the American market, obviously. This translation is still “waiting for publication”, as I still see in my page concerning this book.

Then I picked another American work to translate into Portuguese, The long Cutie, by Dan Alatorre. This has finally been published a couple of weeks ago, to the complete relief of my attendance anxiety. I also liked to see the five-star rating given by this author there with a comment that read: "Great job! Highly recommended". I began to like this kind of tiresome but very interesting game.

Next I picked an Italian author, Roberto Coppola, whose original book is titled Anche Tu Poliglotta. I also translated that into Portuguese and the book is now published as Você Também Poliglota in my translation. It brings lots of tips for self-taught polyglot studies, assesses and suggests some methods to follow and offers an interesting and flexible plan through which any person can reach an upper intermediate level of communication in four languages by studying each for about six months. This author also gave me five stars there for the translation I did.

After this I translated a Spanish author, José Vicente Alfaro, who wrote an interesting novel, El Llanto de la Isla de Pascua into Portuguese. The work was completed within the contracted term and is finally published.

Meanwhile, a Brazilian author called Johann Heyss invited me to translate his book Iniciação à Numerologia, into Italian. It was my first invitation by an author, in the previous works I chose the book and proposed the translation. He is a translator himself and his mentioned book has already an English version (done by himself), plus a French, a German and a Spanish one. Of course he could have invited an Italian translator from those with a Babelcube profile and he doesn’t know me at all outside the Babelcube context. I underwent the whole process, translated a ten-page sample he approved and after this we signed the contract. I’m still working in this book, for which I asked a comfortable deadline and, if necessary, I can always request an extension.

Well, foreign authors also seem to have liked my profile. For instance, an Italian, Demetrio Verbaro, requested my translation of a novel he wrote, Il Carico della Formica into French. Then again, he could easily have chosen a native French translator for this work, but he chose me, and eventually a contract was signed. Now I find myself translating a book from a foreign language into another. Luckily I can count on a francophone girl as a partner to read my translation trough and weed out my misspellings, grammar mistakes and stuff of this kind. Her name isn’t in the standard agreement signed, though; she hasn’t joined Babelcube yet. But we’ve had some previous partnership experiences mainly with translations involving French before and never had any kind of problem concerning either work or money.

The seventh contract I signed this year was for a book of poems written in Spanish by Mois Benarroch. His poems in Esquina en Tetuán are very good to read in the Spanish original. I proposed its translation into Portuguese because I have always wanted to translate poetry and then see the translation published. Everything ran smoothly enough and after getting this last contract I did the translation at a good clip, to my own surprise. Now there is one more book published and I also got my third five-star author rating.

I don’t have the slightest idea of what financial benefits I’ll get from this translation rush I decided and had the opportunity to enter this year. Too early to know and there’s no point in trying any guesstimate. Each new book launched will perform as the Market wishes. No minimum sales guarantee is possible, as far as I know. I believe some of these books stand a chance of selling relatively well, in which case I’ll have my efforts decently rewarded, at long last. My expectations are not unrealistic, however. It is sensible to expect results compatible with my efforts but in fact there is no telling. Even if all my translations end up performing lamely in terms of sales, at least I’ll still have a good number of recent works to bear witness to my stamina, my linguistic versatility and competence, etc., and after all this will serve some purpose, at least by granting me a relative "visibility" as a translator, which no doubt means something already, in business.

I have been spreading the news about this work through internet sites like some social networks, even through my blogs. I know this alone doesn’t represent much of a publicity effort, but I’m convinced some sort of positive effect will end up showing its face.

By the way, you can visit my public Babelcube profile:

http://www.babelcube.com/user/joao-batista-esteves-alves