I was delighted to discover recently that “This Difficult Thing of Being Human” — my book on self-compassion — has been translated into Chinese and Korean. That’s in addition to a Romanian translation I learned about three years ago.
It’s an odd story. I discovered the Romanian translation by accident while browsing on Amazon. I saw my name on the cover of a book but didn’t recognize the title or even the language it was in. Google Translate helped me determine that the book was in Romanian. I asked my editor about this, and yes, it was legit. They’d made a deal with a Romanian publishing company, and had forgotten to tell me. My editor also mentioned that there was possibly a Chinese translation coming out as well.
I promptly forgot about the Chinese translation until a couple of months ago, when I happened to re-read that email while looking for something else.
I asked my publisher if anything had happened with that, and the editor I talked to didn’t know. The person who would no was on extended leave. Two months later they got back to me and told me that the Chinese translation not only existed, but had been published two years ago! That was a surprise!
I was curious about the money side of this and continued the conversation. Then someone in the company mentioned “the Korean translation.” The Korean translation??? I asked for more information, but I found it through searching online before I got a reply.
It’s funny how authors seem to be the least important part of the publishing industry!
Looking for an image of the cover of the Korean translation, I found a review that was really beautifully done, with photographs of the book beside some meticulous hand-written notes. (The link is to a Google translation of the review.)
I haven’t actually seen copies of these books, but I hope that my publisher will be able to track one down and give it to me. Otherwise I’ll have to buy my own books and have them shipped from Asia. (See what I mean about authors being the least important part of the publishing industry?)
Here are links to:
請用正念疼惜自己 (Chinese)
and
인간으로 산다는, 그 어려운 일 (Korean)
I believe that’s nine languages that my books are now available in: English, French, German, Spanish, Finnish, Romanian, Taiwanese, Chinese, and Korean. It would be nice to get that up into double figures.
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