Wednesday, March 03, 2010

Translating Bangla Literature: No Revenue Model Yet

Last night, for a long time, I was thinking of translating some short stories from Bangla language to English. I know that I can do the work and it may not be very good at least, something is better than nothing. At this moment, there is hardly any short story or novel from Bangla literature that have been translated in English. Secondly, the translations are not even available in internet. So, although Bangla has one of the richest literatures in the world, very few people have got taste of it until now. This is sad and sometimes I feel that I leave everything and just do this work. However, I have to think of its impact too. I do not come from a rich family and I have to pay all my bills and then save some money for future.
Thus, I was thinking last night to find a balance between these two. On the one hand, I wanted to translatehttp://translate.google.com/ some short stories from Bangla literature and while on the other hand, I was thinking of a revenue model. I understood that one of the biggest problems is that here people are not yet accustomed to buying e-books. I just simply can translate any short stories and then publish it in a DVD. It is possible but most people do not have a habit of buying e-books. Piracy is another big problem. I was counting the expenses related to this project. The biggest expense is my time. Then I was thinking that if I publish this kind of DVD then it will be pirated very easily and I will not get any money.
I just wish that some people set up an organization or a NGO to work for translation of Bangla literature. 

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