Two More Countries Heard From
Posted on November 17, 2010 Posted by John Scalzi 26 Comments
It’s a good month for The Ghost Brigades: Here you see its Hebrew and Romanian versions, respectively. Both are fairly interesting cover treatments, I have to say.
In other news, I agreed to new foreign language offers for both Fuzzy Nation and The Android’s Dream (which foreign language to be revealed when the contract is actually signed), so my work is still making the rounds. Yay! More new cover art is coming! I love new cover art, man.
Beautiful! It is wonderful when the artwork can tell you about the story, or make you want to read the story.
and no warhammer 40k space marines this time.
It’s interesting how much the Hebrew cover made me think of The God Engines.
GeekBoston@3: Me too, but having read The Ghost Brigades it still feels like a good fit to me. And the Romanian cover – aw heck yeah! I can picture that squint on that character very easily.
John, are those going to be hardcovers?
@GeekBoston – I was thinking the same thing, too.
I followed that thought up with “These versions are so much cooler than the random-exploding-spaceship covers, I’m going to learn to read me some Hebrewese and Romaniananian, just to enjoy these perky covers!”
Then I realised that it might be easier to buy the foreign editions and get ‘creative’ with a craft knife and some binding tools.
I love the Hebrew transliteration of your name, winding up looking like Gyon Sqalzi.
I already have the Hebrew edition of Old Man’s War, and I’m about to do a side-by-side reading of it with my English copy. Now I need to find someone who’s heading to Israel and can snag me a copy of Ghost Brigades for when I finish…
(I’ve found that reading Hebrew translations of books that I’ve already read in English makes for really good language practice. I’ve already finished Harry Potter v’Even haChachamim, and will get to book 2 eventually…)
Some silly questions from a n00b interested in publishing, but how does the whole cover bit work? It seems if the covers weren’t awesome, it would’t be such a cool thing. Who decides what the new cover’ll look like? Who does them? How much input does John have about it? Is this standard practice with books when they’re published in other languages? Really curious about this whole aspect; if the publisher contracts someone to do the covers and translations, and they don’t turn out so good, what recourse does an author have?
How well does the all-important third sentence quality survive the translation process?
SKS:
The publisher commissions the cover, and I see them typically when the book is published.
How about this for a cover image (for something!):
http://www.boingboing.net/2010/11/16/astronaut-watches-th.html
(I posted this yesterday, a few stories down, but is a much better place for it.)
#10 Gyon Sqalzi:
There’s no author input? Damn! Would be really cool to sit down with Michael Whalen and discuss ideas.
Close, and nice art, but failed to be green-skinned.
The one on the left reminds me of the kind of covers you’d see on some of the old DAW SF releases. Reality combined with surreality that doesn’t really tell you what the devil is going on in there.
This arouses my curiosity. Do you have handy a list of the languages into which all your books have been translated? By the time you hit Rumanian, is seems that there should be quite a few.
Yeah, the Hebrew one is so much God Engines.
That, or a Watchmen-inspired translation in two parts, the cover of the second part being the view immediately below the first one.
Chaos @6: ג`ון is not “Gyon” but Jon; that’s not a yod to the left of the gimel, it’s a chubchik (an apostrophe, really) – notice that the yod in the first word of the title, “Brigadot,” doesn’t protrude above the other letters, whereas the chubchik does. In Israeli Hebrew the chubchik modifies, in this case, the hard G of gimel into a “j” sound; two other Hebrew letters are similarly modified to make the sounds “ch” and “zh” – none of these are otherwise writable in Hebrew.
IF only an Arabic publishing company would translate one or more of your novels.
I have a new story at Daily Science Fiction, a new SF market that delivers stories right into your electronical mailbox every day, so long as you have a FREE subscription.
The story’s called “What Lies Between the Bread” and it’s about one of those little shops that wasn’t there yesterday, plus sandwiches.
Thanks for the pimp opportunity, John. The pimportunity. Pimportunity is the name of my Parliament-Funkadelic cover band.
Wrong link is what I gave you. Correct link is Daily Science Fiction.
Oh, crud, I put my pimping in the wrong thread. BLOCKED
@gottacook: that “chubchik” is called a geresh.
@ari b: steimatzki will gladly ship hebrew books to you. see http://www.steimatzky.co.il/Steimatzky/Pages/Product.aspx?ProductID=10670066
@some guy: I’ll have to check that out. Shipping might be a bit steep. I survived on Steimatsky when I lived in J-lem for a year, they were my source for English SF along with Sefer va Sefel, and Tmol Shilshom, the two best used book store/cofee shop combos ever. (SvS has better book options, TS has better food.)
Forget the cover… the inside of the Hebrew version is good! I read Old Man’s War in Hebrew recently and they evidently have a good translator doing your books here (not always the case – Sci Fi is hard to translate well into Hebrew, the tech terms can come out ridiculous if it’s done carelessly). Good book, too!
#6 — A Gimmel with an apostraphe makes a “J” sound.
Love the Hebrew Cover… Any idea how to order foreign language editions cheaply?