eBook Translation to Chinese- ON HOLD

The eBook I created is good for a few Amazon stores globally, but some have been missed off the list as there is an expectation that the language needs to change for those items to be sold in those stores.

China wasn’t on the list and I had the need for another project after I complete the 2nd book.

My thoughts were to see if I could translate the first eBook into another language. As the book is about scripts its more technical so the prose are not as important. Eg stick left Hand index finger up left nostril and wiggle. Clear steps to follow.

What set me off on this track was the Free Software where you can get a legitimate LICENSE and one of them was for a translation program. Alas the free license code had expired, but it got me interested in the challenge of translating the book.

eBook Manuscript translation with Google Translate

There are a few other features to Google Translate that I was not aware of, one being that it can translate a webpage if you give it a URL and also that it will translate a document, so you can upload a .docx file and it will translate it into the language of your choosing, up to a point, I’m sure.

Script Block translation

The script block has to stay in English code as there does not seem to be a Chinese version of the code, but there are the comments that can be translated, so I will need to go through that part of it and translate the comments

YouTube Shorts Subtitle translations

When you upload videos to YouTube it will automatically create subtitles in the language of the video. From that you can download that file and translate the file and then upload it.

have worked out a process for doing this for the YouTube shorts for the eBook and have a Google Sheet spreadsheet using the formula of =GOOGLETRANSLATE(text, [source_language], [target_language]), and if you put the source/target languages into specific cells then you can use the same spreadsheet for the subtitles of different languages. I have about 60 short videos in the ebook so I am having to create Chinese subtitle files for this , but after setting it up I could possibly translate into Spanish, German and other languages.

Ive done to chapter 4, and easily over half way, so just need to do 5 to 8. Still a lot to do. Acts as a relaxing respite to the writing of eBok 2, I’m bogged down with the licensing script at the moment.

eBook Cover translation

I’ve also had a crack at this in Canva, this is the result

End Comment

The project is more about the process and making the document available to a lot more people than if it was only in English. The quality of my original prose is pretty low, but I’ve hopefully compensated for that by having the YouTube Shorts videos to show and adding subtitles for those too.

It might be interesting, if the flow and workload is not too complex, that I may be able to translate it to more obscure languages like Tatum, Khmer and some African languages too. Maybe Swahili?

07-05-2022

The process hit a bit of a roadblock on a number of fronts.

• couldn’t see how to setup and publish on the Amazon China site, the only suggestion (from an article I fund) was to use ingramSpark
• On Amazon.com (US) it needs to be translated into Chinese TRADITIONAL. I’m still trying to figure which language code that is. Still exploring
• I auto-translated videos with Chinese subtitles.

I will pause this for the time being and do a French/German/Italian Translation of the book first. I think German may be the first language.