A couple of months ago I reviewed Robert Spoo's interesting work, Without Copyrights, which looked at the near-free-for-all that American copyright law made for with regard to foreign (both translated and first-published-abroad-in-English) works in the US well into the 20th century.
Among the interesting developments was that of 'trade courtesy' among publishers, who often essentially deferred to whoever published first -- as if the work was copyright protected.
Publishers went along with this because they also benefited, able to expect (more or less) that no one would compete with them in turn when they published a foreign work.
The system wasn't iron-clad -- new entrants had clear incentives to cheat and bring out competing editions, for example -- but for the most part it worked surprisingly well.
Iran, one of the few countries that still operates largely outside international copyright law, is in many ways in a similar situation as the United States was over a hundred years ago regarding the copyright protection for foreign (in their case basically: translated) work. This leads to competing translations being published -- often at nearly the same time: just last week I mentioned that two translations of Murakami Haruki's A Wild Sheep Chase were published in Iran within two weeks of one another.
An extreme case is that of Khaled Hosseini's recent novel, And the Mountains Echoed -- the second-bestselling title at Amazon.com in 2013. Apparently they figured it would be popular in Iran too -- and IBNA report that:
Aside from the fact that it's pretty impressive that they could get ten different translations to market so quickly -- well, this obviously isn't an ideal situation for anyone, from readers, who are presumably hard-pressed to guess which translation is the best, to the publishers who lose potential sales to competing editions. (I fear that, at least as far as royalties go, authors tend to be losers regardless of how their books are brought to the Iranian market: I assume that Mr. Hosseini and most others aren't collecting any royalties on any of these editions (though as in the US of yesteryear the author's blessing -- in the form of agreeing to 'authorized editions' -- can set translations apart and provide the author with a bit of cash-flow).)
Iran, one of the few countries that still operates largely outside international copyright law, is in many ways in a similar situation as the United States was over a hundred years ago regarding the copyright protection for foreign (in their case basically: translated) work. This leads to competing translations being published -- often at nearly the same time: just last week I mentioned that two translations of Murakami Haruki's A Wild Sheep Chase were published in Iran within two weeks of one another.
An extreme case is that of Khaled Hosseini's recent novel, And the Mountains Echoed -- the second-bestselling title at Amazon.com in 2013. Apparently they figured it would be popular in Iran too -- and IBNA report that:
There are more that ten translations of the book in Iranian book market.Obviously, the 'trade courtesy' model did not apply here ....
Aside from the fact that it's pretty impressive that they could get ten different translations to market so quickly -- well, this obviously isn't an ideal situation for anyone, from readers, who are presumably hard-pressed to guess which translation is the best, to the publishers who lose potential sales to competing editions. (I fear that, at least as far as royalties go, authors tend to be losers regardless of how their books are brought to the Iranian market: I assume that Mr. Hosseini and most others aren't collecting any royalties on any of these editions (though as in the US of yesteryear the author's blessing -- in the form of agreeing to 'authorized editions' -- can set translations apart and provide the author with a bit of cash-flow).)