Quote:
Originally Posted by Requiem
Just a point I want to make here, a large amount of PD books are translations of even older texts. (Think Beowulf) The translator gets his copyright on the work he did, when theoretically he didn't change a single word. (emphasis on theoretically) Is that not copyrighting of work done on a title without adding any new material?
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A good translator brings creativity and originality to the translation, which is why the translation deserves its own copyright.
Even a literal word-for-word translation by a human contains some original input, since words very rarely have a one to one correspondece to words in another language.
However, if I took a book and bunged it through
http://translate.google.com/ and then packaged the resulting text, I wouldn't expect to have a new copyright on that text. (And anyone who tried to read it would demand their money back anyway!)
Just for fun, a Google translation to French:
Un bon traducteur apporte la créativité et l'originalité de la traduction, ce qui explique pourquoi la traduction de son propre mérite le droit d'auteur.
Même une interprétation littérale mot à mot la traduction par l'homme contient des intrants d'origine, car les mots ont une très rarement à un correspondece à des mots dans une autre langue.
Toutefois, si j'ai pris un livre et bunged par
http://translate.google.com/ puis emballés le texte, je ne serais pas s'attendre à un nouveau droit d'auteur sur ce texte. (Et ceux qui ont essayé de lire la demande de leur argent en tout cas!)