José Joaquín Ramos asks for

A Translator

The editor of a website with which we share links, Alfa Eridani, posts a help-wanted advert for a position difficult to fill:

I am writing to you because I need somebody who could translate from Swedish to Spanish. I suppose the case wouldn’t be easy, because I presume there are very few translators from Swedish to Spanish, and because I need somebody do the work without regain, and this is a big work.

Because I would like to publish a Swedish novel in episodes; the copyright is free. I’m talking about Oxygen och Aromasia. The complete novel may be copied from http://www.lysator.liu.se/runeberg/oxygen/. But I have a problem: to find someone who wants to translate 25.000 words from Swedish to Spanish without payment.

I thought someone could translate from Swedish to English, and then I could find someone who translate it from English to Spanish. But I thought it would be double work, and that the novel would loose quality.

If you were not able to find such translator, I would understand it, as it is a quite difficult issue that I am asking.

My best regards,

José Joaquín Ramos

If anyone can help Mr. Ramos, please e-mail us.

At 25,000 words, the novel would run about 8 to 10 standard-size installments in Bewildering Stories. We’ve published several works of about that length or longer.

The real sticking point is not really language: surely there are native speakers of Spanish who also read Swedish and who could do the translation. Rather, the problem is money: translators do not normally undertake such a substantial piece of work without being paid. Possibly a university student might do so provided he earned some kind of academic credit for it.

Bewildering Stories might be interested in an English translation, but we do not have the means to pay for that, either. Even so, imagine Oxygen och Aromasia translated into English, and then into Spanish, and then into... any number of languages as the story makes its way around the world. I would like to see the look on the author’s face when the story is finally retranslated back into Swedish. Truly a Bewildering Story.

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