There are pros and cons to translating books through royalty-based translation platforms such as Babelcube. For indie authors who believe they can expand their readership without upfront costs, the low threshold of such translation platforms is obviously appealing. However, our personal experience is that the negatives of this business model far outweigh the positives, even if not specifically for authors. Here are at least 4 good reasons not to translate your books with Babelcube and the like.

Translation platforms and author’s copyrights

Babelcube in particular will ask you to enter a 5 year contract. You will give up your copyrights for 5 years even if no translator ever offers to translate your books. During this period you may be forced to turn down other opportunities regardless of the success or lack of success of your sales through their platform.

Based on the comments of quite a few authors on various online forums, getting your copyrights back and especially getting the books removed from the stores at the end of the 5 year agreement will not be as easy as you might believe it to be. Think of where you were 5 years ago. Does that not feel an excessively long time for something that costs you your freedom without promising anything in return under the guise of not asking for money up front?

Publishing through a translation platform

If and when you finally have your translation, you may never know exactly when your books will actually go online and sometimes it may take months before they appear on the online stores.

In my case, two Christmas novels that had been translated and approved in September were not published until the end of January – the season sales were obviously lost. I mentioned this incident during the Q&As session of my webinar for the 2021 International Translation Day Event at Proz.com, which you can watch in this video.

Issues promoting your books

Since there’s no way to track when the translation goes live, you’ll never get pre-order links and therefore you’ll never be able to run pre-order promotions. Since Babelcube acts as publisher even though it is merely an intermediary between you and the translator, you will not be able to buy ads on Amazon or other stores to promote sales either.

You will therefore only be able to use Facebook or Google ads at an ever increasing cost since the European GDPR has made target segmentation more difficult. Price promotions are equally painful. While you can theoretically change the price, you’ll never know in advance if and when the promotion is active and you won’t be able to synchronise the ads.

You cannot choose which stores will sell your translations and they will be distributed to a very limited number of stores (in the case of Babelcube, these are currently Barnes & Noble, Apple, Kobo, Scribd, Tolino, Amazon and Google Play) regardless of the target market. For example, Amazon accounts for about 80% of all ebook sales in Italy, and you will not be able to take advantage of an Amazon exclusive with Kindle Unlimited through Babelcube, even if you wanted to. Based on feedback from authors, the Amazon print-on-demand option does not seem to be easily accessible through Babelcube either.

Working with a translator on revenue sharing

Without paid advertising, the promotion of your book is left to the translator, who may or may not be able to promote your book to book bloggers and on social media (which is more or less the only free promotion they can do). Even if they have the additional skills to promote your book (not to mention the skills to translate it properly in the first place), you will not be able to support their efforts and drive sales because, as mentioned above, you will not be able to buy ads on the store’s website.

While the contract with a translator is binding, people work for a living. I’ve seen many translators give up halfway through a book as soon as a better opportunity to earn money presented itself, because they simply couldn’t afford to wait for the royalties. While it is hard to blame them, you are still stuck in a 5 year contract with the platform that prevents you from hiring your translator directly to finish the job, and you have to wait indefinitely for someone else to offer to start the translation again. You may never see the end of it.

Translation platforms and quality assurance

Can you check the quality of the translation? Babelcube doesn’t do any quality control, that’s up to the author/publisher. There are a few reader reviews that explicitly complain about the quality of the translation in more than one case. Sales have of course been adversely affected, and the author/publisher has not been able to have the book withdrawn because they accepted the translation in good faith and had to wait until the 5 year contract expired, if not longer.

It is a very unfortunate reality that some users have registered as translators on platforms such as Babelcube and appear to be simply providing copy and paste from Google Translate as I explained in this article. Please note that this can also have a negative impact on the perception of the original text and yourself as the author.

Hiring a professional translator

These are the main reasons why you should not use translation platforms like Babelcube to translate your books. And we can tell you more privately.

If you are serious about translating your books and marketing them internationally, we do not think translation platforms like Babelcube are the right solution. Whatever language you want your books translated into, hiring a professional translator is the safest option. We provide high quality Italian translations from English, German and Spanish and help you promote your book in Italy. If you’d like a quote, feel free to contact us.