Quote:
Originally Posted by jbcohen
Open office is a pro at languege translations and I recommend that authors use it to translate into any of the many different langueges on this globe. For shorter translations try translate.google.com.
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... sorry to butt in, but you're not actually seriously suggesting anyone use machine translation for anything beyond the purpose of getting an approximate idea of content written in another language, are you?
It's just that machine translation works
reasonably with certain big languages right now (English-German, English-French) and by "reasonably" I mean that you get the gist of the meaning reasonably well and occasionally maybe even a shorter sentence will come out actually correctly, but it's still not at a good enough level for full machine translations of technical texts, and for fiction - forget it.
For many smaller languages, machine translation is currently as good as useless even for understanding fictional texts.
I've seen one author offer machine translations of her novels from English into German, for sale. It was... not pretty.
As for the original post, I'd also say that offering ebooks both in epub and mobi would be the best solution. Epub is probably the leading format in mainland Europe, but more and more people have bought Kindles (not just in the countries with their own Kindle stores, but also others), so offering a Kindle-compatible format instead of expecting a significant share of potential customers to convert the epub files into mobi themselves would not be a bad idea.