The Global Watchtower blog reports that Dan Brown’s new novel The Lost Symbol will be translated into Swedish at top speed by a team of translators working on 100 pages each. They will have
seven days to complete the job. Although the Global Watchtower folks call this crowdsourcing, I don’t think that that particular label is entirely applicable here, as the project is being broken into six parts and sent out to professional translators.
The book is scheduled to be released in English on September 15, and the US publisher is apparently reluctant to release the manuscript before then due to fears that it could turn up on file-sharing sites. So, the Swedish publisher is enlisting a team in order to get the book onto Swedish store shelves by October 21.
Perhaps this extreme measure was necessary from a business standpoint given the unusual circumstances, but I wonder if other publishers around the world are following suit? And one can only hope that this translation process does not become the “new normal” for literature.
