How do I protect copy for book translator?

Question

Hello. My instructional book is being translated into Chinese, and the translator has all of the formatted text. I'm not concerned about pirating from the text, because this book would require having its 1,000 plus images in order to make it worth pirating.

The book is technical and difficult to understand without the images, which means that the translator will better understand what she is translating if I share a stripped down version of the book with images flowing within the text.

So I'm trying to figure out solutions to protect a pdf that I share with her. Watermarking looks pretty easy to remove. Password protection doesn't sound to be worthwhile either.

One thought I had was to alter the export settings to make the images low quality and require effort to see them.

Any other ideas?

Thanks!

Jeff33740050deru · Accepted Answer

That's a good argument in favor of going with a freelancer. However, I remain slightly skeptical about anyone who starts talking about a freelance translator without also talking about the freelance editor, and additionally how they can handle the QA and/or post-layout proofing in house. Here in a discussion group focused on InDesign, the idea that the post-translation layout can be handled by the posters themselves is comparatively uncontroverisal (although there are abundant counterexamples). But the whole rest of the workflow is not mentioned at all, and Translation + Edit + Proofread is the ground-floor basic translation workflow. I suppose you could also have Machine Translation + Post MT Edit + Proofread, but you're still talking about a workflow that can't be sourced from a single human being.

All that being said, I'm quite accustomed to the workflow that looks more like One Freelancer in China + The Designer Who Doesn't Read Chinese Lays Out the Translation + The Bilingual Coworker Who Moved to the US in High School Proofs from PDF And Also Suggests A Few Edits. It's just not something I can reccomend to strangers on the Internet, not when I know how it's properly done.

Thank you, David. I'll look into copyright registration in China.

Joel, I'm a self-publishing author handling all of the post-translation work myself, except that I have a local Chinese friend who will be proofreading.

You used the term glaze, which I hadn't heard for digital images before, so I looked it up and found this app. I don't know if it will do enough, but it may be an additional option.

https://glaze.cs.uchicago.edu/what-is-glaze.html

Dave Creamer of IDEAS · Answer

Not my area of expertise, but my two cents...

I'm assuming you are concerned about the translator. I would use a translator in the same country (and subject to the same copyright laws) as I live, has been in business for a long time, and is a long-term member of a professional association (such as the American Translators Association). I would select a freelancer and not a translation company, since they would probably farm it out to someone overseas anyway.

Also, register the copyright before sending it to the translator.

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