Omid Scobie's New Book - PART 2

[Mymilkshakebringsallthepapstomycar]

I'm not sure what is the correct etiquette for carrying on a thread, but here we are. Thanks to @BoxedandRibboned for the original thread.

Original thread:

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/the_royal_family/4935714-omid-scobies-new-book?page=40&reply=131041571

@twined in the UK it has to be a place sanctified for marriage and there need to be 2 witnesses. In the US you just need a licence and can get married anywhere.

Also, I'm not even sure it would be a libel case brought in this jurisdiction. Possibly it would be brought in the Netherlands? I think defamation can be a crime there if a police report is filed.

I don't think the Palace will "have to". Saying that they are considering "all options" is I think just a bland statement that means nothing.

And they've weathered so much other stuff, just by doing nothing other than carry on.

Christmas message might be a little difficult to draft this year though!

Currently 14th in GB Amazon, so not exactly a runaway bestseller in what should be its biggest market. Given how badly written it is, and that any major revelations are already all over the media, I doubt it will sustain even that level of sales for long.

No, it’s really not that simple.

I think it's simpler than that - he wants a free-for-all in the internet age to report in national outlets about anything, any time, with much looser laws around libel.

As this was all over the internet (including on MN) hours before he spoke, this was a good example to highlight how national laws don't stand up against internet publication.

Now he's blaming the translator which is despicable because it's unheard of for professional translators to embellish or add content. It's their basic codex for the job.

Not strictly relevant to the debate in hand, but this is not really true: translators regularly change content for various reasons: For instance I have altered certain passages with the publisher's agreement when the original comes over as unwittingly sexist / racist in English:

@AuxArmesCitoyens But I assume you wouldn't add whole paragraphs of text that did not appear in the original draft in any context or add in the names of actual people who were not named in the original. That seems to go well beyond changes that are necessary like the example you give.

He won't. He said in an interview (IIRC printed in The Independent) before the release date that he was leaving royal reporting for new challenges (unspecified).

I thought at the time that this meant he'd burnt his bridges with H&M (who had been trying to distance themselves from the book) and never had any other good sources, so he needed to put a positive spin on what was actually the end of this road for him

But surely not changing the content, more the context?

Well, it depends what the publisher is asking me to do: I have rewritten entire chunks of books sometimes: As I said upthread, I don't imagine that's what happened here though, I do think that given the time constraints the translator was working from an earlier unedited version that had the names in: (sorry for all the colons, MN won't accept full stops from my keyboard for some reason!)

@AuxArmesCitoyens That's really interesting. Would that happen in a non fiction/factual context? Once you've rewritten the passages, do they need the approval of the original author, or just the editor/publisher?

Yes I've done it in non-fiction: It would usually be run past the author, but some authors are more involved in the process than others: It depends on the language, too: some countries are more professional than others when it comes to the editing process:

I mean, I wouldn't necessarily expect OS to look at / sign off on languages he has no knowledge of, especially if it's in a non-Latin alphabet: I mean you sell the foreign publisher the rights, you trust them to do the job properly (which sometimes means rewriting the content to some extent to suit the target market)

Except if you marry by Archbishop's licence from the Archbishop of Canterbury.

He's literally the only person who can authorise a marriage in ways that normally are not allowed (such as place)

@AuxArmesCitoyens This is an education! I had no idea that there could be such large differences in text between translations. Not checking key passages seems like a very risky strategy to me, if you are an author writing about real people, currently living. Even just having the translator read out to you what they have translated and changed.

So you would just throw in a very serious accusation against a King and future Queen?

New thread created:

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/the_royal_family/4954329-omid-scobie-endgame-part-3

of course not: I've said repeatedly I don't think that's what happened here, just that translation isn't always as straightforward a process as people seem to think:

That would be completely impractical in many cases: But in a case like this where the legal stakes are so high I would expect serious fact checking to take place: As above, I think here what happened is that the project was under a time crunch to release all the language versions at the same time - usually the translator works from the finished product and the translation comes out a year or two later - and so they were working from an earlier draft and someone screwed up on making sure the legal edits got sent round to everyone:

I was thinking more along the lines of an author knowing that there's a particularly contentious bit to his/her book, and ensuring that no material changes of context are made to ensure this doesn't leave them open to litigation (rather than great chunks of otherwise not contentious text, which I agree wouldn't be practical to get re-checked).

Can I ask, do standard contracts/licences for translations include disclaimers for liability on the part of the local publisher for the foreign language versions? Or does the licence include the adoption of such liabilities (am thinking, shifting liability from the original author over to the foreign publisher)?

I'm not a lawyer and have never worked on anything hugely contentious so I'm not sure of the finer details TBH: I would expect that anything that had bombshell potential would be closely followed up: The translator's legal liability is unclear AFAIK: we are legally authors of our translations, but also beholden to the original: Not sure legal liability for translated publications has ever been tested in the courts, it would be interesting to find out! It would be very difficult to prove legal liability in any case because the responsibility for the mistake would be spread up and down the publishing chain of command: It would be up to the editor as much as the translator to take responsibility:

He won't. He said in an interview (IIRC printed in The Independent) before the release date that he was leaving royal reporting for new challenges (unspecified).

So he reckons he's drained that sump dry then. Interesting. 'Royal reporting' is a bit of a stretch, though.

Thank you. This has been really interesting to learn about. It would make a great test case, by the sounds of it.

it really would!