How do I protect copy for book translator?

[Jeff33740050deru]

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!

[Dave Creamer of IDEAS]

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. 

[Jeff33740050deru]

It is a freelancer but in China. Too late to change that, but good suggestions, especially for those who find this thread later with a similar dilemma. Thanks

[Dave Creamer of IDEAS]

See if you are allowed to register it with the China Copyright Protection Center.

[Joel Cherney]

This is great advice, although usually it's better for people shopping for translation to go to a firm instead of selecting their own freelancer. It's comparatively hard to know how to build your own trusted translation workflow, and easy to find a reputable firm that will, upon request, use translation suppliers that are e.g. all located in the US.

Honestly, the only secure means to achieve what you want is to have your language suppliers literally onsite. You know, the kind of secure facility that requires you to leave your electronic devices in lockers at the front desk? 

If you don't need that level of security, you're probably just ham-stringing your translation supplier. Without knowing nearly enough about what you are doing to make a real suggestion, I'd say that you ought to just watermark and glaze your images, and hope that your translation supplier is not also selling your data elsewhere. Or alternately halt the project, write it down as a learning experience, and find a language services provider that can meet your requirements. Three are industries that have legal requirements to use only translation suppliers located in the States, it's not a hard service to find.

[Dave Creamer of IDEAS]

The only reason I didn't recommend a firm was that one can develop a personal (business) relationship with the translator. And for all anyone knows, they could be using the freelancer too. A firm would work if their translator is in-house or the firm contract takes responsibility for the behavior of the freelance translator. 

(I don't know if the OP said they were in the USA, but might have missed it.)

[Joel Cherney]

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. 

[Jeff33740050deru · Accepted solution]

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

[Joel Cherney]

Glazing is meant to make your images less useful to sometime feeding them to AI for mimicry purposes. Probably not strictly necessary in your case, but it belongs in the same toolkit as watermarking -a tool to consider if you are going to distribute your proprietary information, and fear that it will be distributed without your permission. I can't guess what kind of images you have that your translator may or may not need to see, but if they are diagrams or line art or etc., then probably glazing isn't hugely useful for you. 

At the scale you describe, it makes a lot of sense to me to make your images less useful to piracy by making low resolution watermarked images. You'd be trying to make reuse or piracy inconvenient or unprofitable, not impossible. 

[Jeff33740050deru]

Thanks Joel. Yes, lots of diagrams. I'll certainly make the images low resolution and watermarked. I see there may be better watermarking tools that burn in the watermark rather than overlaying it. Here's one:

https://quoteunquoteapps.com/bronson/ 

I don't really understand how it works, but it seems to merge the watermark and pdf file into an image file.