[PW] Re: Number of languages a work has been translated to

[Dennis Lien]

At 02:30 PM 11/7/2006, you wrote:
>Hi,
>   Is there a database, Web page or resource that shows how many languages 
> a work has been translated to?
>   Is there a way to then find out who the rightholders are?
>
>
>   Thanks,
>   Salomeh


We had the "how many languages" question here earlier this year; here's
what I posted at that time:

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PW] Re: another publishing question
Dennis Lien Dennis.K.Lien-1 at tc.umn.edu
Tue Jan 31 14:02:11 PST 2006

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At 03:00 PM 1/31/2006, you wrote:
 >This is a question I was asked years ago, but for some reason today's
 >thread reminded me of it.  I was once asked to find out into how many
 >languages an author's work was translated.  Specifically, the question was
 >about Sartre...into how many languages was his worked translated.  I never
 >did find the answer...
 >
 >Jo-Ann


I don't know of a quick source, but if I had to do this I'd start by:

(1)
Searching him as an author in WorldCat, then limiting the results by
"language" (which brings up a list, sorted by most to fewest entries
by language; doing so just now for books only shows 28 listed language
(27 if we don't count the original French), plus a catch-all of 57
entries classed as "Other" which would have to be examined separately).

(2)
Searching the free INDEX TRANSLATIONUM database from UNESCO

http://databases.unesco.org/xtrans/xtra-form.html

and going laboriously through the results (almost 800 records
since 1979) to see if it adds any languages to the WorldCat total
(no way to sort results by target language, unfortunately)

(3)
and then deciding what the likeliest languages not already
"found" are and, where possible, checking online national
library holdings for possible evidence via links from the likes of

http://www.libdex.com/

http://www.theeuropeanlibrary.org/portal/index.htm

http://lanic.utexas.edu/la/region/library/

to see if I could squeeze out a few more.


This almost certainly wouldn't get them all -- WorldCat won't
show volumes not held by member libraries (mostly US/Canadian),
for instance, and the online IT database covers only 1979 to
date, doesn't cover all countries/languages, and has a fair
number of typographical/spelling errors that affect retrieval,
for instance -- but it should eventually give a pretty good list.

But not, as I said, quick. . .

Dennis Lien / U of Minnesota Libraries // d-lien at umn.edu

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As for researching who holds the rights to a given work, a few suggestions
I have bookmarked:

http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/okbooks.html

http://www.scils.rutgers.edu/~lesk/copyrenew.html

http://www.copyright.gov/records/#locis

http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/cce/

http://tyler.hrc.utexas.edu/

http://www.societyofauthors.net/soa/page_id.php4?pid=102&sid=6&urlsection=Literary+Estates

http://www.sfwa.org/org/estates.htm


Dennis Lien / U of Minnesota Libraries // d-lien at umn.edu