For Don Ysidro

"Don Ysidro" is set in southern Mexico, in an area of high desert with mountains around. If you want to make appropriate dialect choices, you might want to think of how mountain people speak in your language. In the English version of the story, though, the speech is pretty neutral for dialect.

The place names in the story are real, but these are all very small villages. Certainly it is fine to give a free translation of the place names. El Puentecito is "The Little Bridge." Malpasa is "Bad Pass." I have a hard time making sense of "Palpan de Baranda" even with my knowledge of Spanish and a dictionary.

The "Mejica" was another name referring to the Aztecs, the people whose empire gave Mexico its modern name. Mejica=Mexica=Mexico. For clarity, you could just use your word for the Aztec people.

A segueta is a little thin saw blade. Fret saw. Usually I think such a blade is part of a frame or handle, as for a hacksaw, but when used as a pottery tool, the blade is handled without a frame.

Since the village does not have its own church, I assume that the villagers a buried in the churchyard of El Puentecito.

Questions about "La Geometrie"

To the translators: Please don't hesitate to ask questions about language or culture. I'll try to remember to post answers here since the question that one person has is likely to arise for others.

One translator wanted clarification on the allusion to "Boulder." He also wanted to make sure that Joseph and Dan were lovers, and he used the word "queen."

Boulder is a city, yes. Boulder, Colorado. It is where the University of Colorado is, and it is also a famously liberal town. During the 1960's and 1970's, it was a place where many hippies lived, and they were supposedly likely to give their children names like Rain or Rainbow for girls and Forest or Walker for boys. Actually, such names were never terribly common in Boulder and would be less common today, but people from other parts of Colorado and elsewhere in the U.S. still have the idea that Boulder is a town of hippies.

You do indeed understand the relationship between Dan and Joseph. First, a primer in some of the terminology: The inoffensive word for speaking about homosexuals in the U.S. is "gay." The word can apply to male or female homosexuals, although for women the word "lesbian" is usually preferred as it is more specific to women. "Queer" as an adjective or noun applies to homosexual men or women. It is mildly offensive, but homosexuals will use it casually to refer to themselves. "Queen" means a homosexual male, especially an effeminate male.

My own sense of the story is that Joseph is gay and not interested in women at all. Dan is clearly interested in a woman but will settle for a man, making him bisexual. But neither of these men is a queen. That is, Joseph is not effeminate, because otherwise Rain would be able to guess that he is not interested in girls. And Dan apparently presents himself to Rain as a masculine man, so that Rain does not guess either of his sexual relationship with Joseph.

Contract Ideas

Here are some points I want to cover in my contract with translators. These are all just draft ideas so far, written in a way that I hope addresses the needs and protects the interests of both parties.

Please feel free to post suggestions as comments.

1. Seeking print publication for translations of my stories. The translator has the right sign contracts for the print or web publication of individual story translations without further approval from me. Any fee for print or web publication of the story will be divided as follows: For a fee equal to or less than fifty dollars U.S. or its equivalent, the translator is entitled to the entire fee. For a fee between fifty and one-hundred dollars or its equivalent, the translator is entitled to fifty dollars and I get the remainder. For fees over one-hundred dollars or its equivalent, the translator and I will share the fee equally.

2. If the translator is operating a translation version of shortshortshort.com, the translator is responsible for setting the subscription price, determining the terms by which stories will be offerd to subscribers (i.e. how many stories, how often), collecting subscription fees, and sending the stories to subscribers in a timely manner. The translator is also responsible for providing text for a web page on www.shortshortshort.com which describes the subscription service in the target language.

3. The translator must give me a free subscription to the translated stories. The translator may, at the translator's option, provide the texts of translations to be posted at www.shortshortshort.com as advertising.

4. A translator who is operating a version of shortshortshort.com will have, to a large extent, an exclusive license to translate my short-short stories. This is to reward the translator for the risk he or she undertakes to establish the e-mail subscription service. If other translators ask to translate my short-short stories, I will in most cases deny such requests. Exceptions: If a publisher approaches me with an offer of publication, I will first suggest that the publisher work contract with the shortshortshort.com translator for translation. However, if the publisher prefers to work with another translator, I may grant the publisher permission to work with the publisher's choice of translator.

5. If a translator is not operating an e-mail subscription service, no such exclusive license is granted, and the translator acknowledges that if another translator is found who does wish to operate the subscription service, that translator will be granted exclusive license. However, such exclusive license will not prohibit or impede the publication of existing translations.

6. I may accept payment for subscriptions to the translation service. If I do so, I will forward the subscriber's name and e-mail address, and the translator will add this subscriber to the translator's subscription service.

7. The translator agrees to pay me half of the translator's gross receipts for subscriptions. Gross receipts are the subscription price minus any transaction fees, such as PayPal charges or credit-card fees that were subtracted when the payment to the translator was processed.

8. Annual report. At the end of each calendar year, I will report to the translator any payments that I accepted for payments to the translator's service. I will make such reports no later than January 10. The translator will then report the following back to me: The names and e-mail addresses of subscribers to the service. The gross receipts from subscriptions. Sales of any print or web publication rights for individual stories.

9. Annual payment. At the time of the report, the translator will remit to me whatever payment is owed to me for the year's print and web publications and subscription receipts, less any amount that I owe the translator for translation subscriptions for which I received payment directly from the subscriber.

10. The translator is authorized to provide the original story in English to subscribers along with the translator's translation. It is up to the translator whether or not to charge extra for receiving the story in both languages.

11. Books or group publications. This agreement does not extend to the publication of books or any print or web publications which would use more than three short-short stories at a time. Translation rights for books or groups of more than three stories must be conferred under a separate agreement.

12. The translator has the right to sell or transfer ownership of the translator's subscription service, subject to my approval. Such approval will not be unreasonably denied.

13. Should the translator's subscription service fail to meet its obligations to subscribers for a period of two consecutive months or longer, the translator's license may be revoked. It is therefore in the translator's interest to consider how the translator could continue to operate the subscription service without interruption in the event of illness or injury.

14. This agreement does not extend to any of my other written works, including novels, non-fiction, or stories longer than 2,500 words. This agreement covers only the translation of those stories that appeared in the collections Flaming Arrows and The Keyhole Opera and those stories which I sent out to e-mail subscribers of www.shortshortshort.com.

Please introduce yourself!

We are a diverse group, not only geographically, but in the degree and kind of experience we've had in translation. (And, yes, I have done some literary translation myself. I appreciate the difficulties you face!) One thing we share is a sense of adventure. I don't think anyone else has been running a subscription service like shortshortshort.com, and I know that no one else has created a community of translators like this.

Welcome! Please introduce yourselves to one another! We have business to talk, but let's begin by getting to know one another a little.

Announcement Page Template

Here, in English, is the text for the home page of www.shortshortshort.com/francais.

One early step in creating www.shortshortshort.com in a new language is to translate this page --- modified, of course, to suit your plans for pricing, payment methods, launch date of your subscription service, and anything else you may want to tell readers in your target language.

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What is a short-short story? This English phrase may be translated as a very very short story.

"What is a short short story? A sudden fiction? A flash fiction? Definitions are sometimes made by arbitrarily choosing a story length. For example, a flash fiction is a story of fewer than 750 words. But my favorite definition of the short-short is from Kate Wilhelm's introduction to my collection of short-shorts, Flaming Arrows. Among the ways that we can know the house of fiction: The reader can be invited in to tour the rooms and search the closets. That's a novel. Or the reader may be invited to stand outside at a window and look into one particular room. That's a short story. Or the reader may have to kneel at a keyhole and peer in to see just enough to know what's going on in a part of that room. That's the short-short story, the most compressed of narratives and the one that demands the most of readers." - Bruce Holland Rogers

Since January 2002, for just ten dollars U.S. a year (twelve Canadian, ten euro, or six pounds sterling) subscribers have been receiving short-short stories by Bruce Holland Rogers in their email boxes. Most of these readers must like what they're getting, since the majority renew.

Beginning in (month year), this service will be available in Czech. For only ten euro, receive two times a month stories by Bruce Holland Rogers in your email inbox. These stories will be an unpredictable mix of literary fiction, science fiction, fairy tales, mysteries, and work that is unclassifiable.

Twenty-four stories for ten euro. About forty-two cents a story.

Subscription stories are between 200 and 2,500 words long (with rare exceptions). Most of the stories distributed so far have been between 500 and 1500 words. Bruce's ideal is to send a story that readers can enjoy in a minute or two.

The stories arrive as unformatted e-mail text, which makes it easy to read them on a variety of devices. Paying subscribers are allowed to forward stories to other readers (although distribution by those recipients is prohibited...unless they subscribe).

Rogers is an award-winning writer (Pushcart Prize, two Nebula Awards, the Bram Stoker, etc.), and many of the subscription stories have gone on to appear in print in such magazines and anthologies as The Sun, Realms of Fantasy, Descant, Analog, and Polyphony. But subscribers read them first!

One subscription story, "Don Ysidro," has won the 2004 World Fantasy Award for the best short fiction work of fantasy published in the English language for 2004.

And the stories are now available in Czech!

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www.shortshortshort.com translations

Welcome to Shortshortshort.com Global, a conversation space for translators of short-short stories by Bruce Holland Rogers. Here is where we can talk about the stories, the challenges of translating obscure English-language idioms, and topics related to publishing Bruce's stories conventionally or distributing them by e-mail to paying subscribers.