[pp.int.general] copyright vs. "droit d'auteur"

[Carlos Ayala Vargas]

Anton Tamminen wrote:
> Reinier Bakels wrote:
>> PP should oppose people  with $€ signs in teir eyes, not artists who 
>> want to protect their cultural values.
> Business doesn't want to publish bad translations and it usually 
> doesn't want to do that under the author's name, because that would be 
> bad PR.
I think you both think of commercial issues. What about the very meaning 
of the intellectual works, e.g., books and music lyrics?

If you write these lyrics:
/
I wanna *make love to you* all night long/

and I translate it into Spanish this way

/Quiero *besarte* hasta que amanezca/ (i.e., I wanna *kiss you* till dawn)

/till dawn/ is not exactly the same as /all night long/, though may be 
accepted -specially if required to keep the rhyme in Spanish-; however, 
what about /kissing/making love/? Clearly not the same, not meaning the 
same, and the depth of what lyrics say might have been downplayed due to 
many reasons -e.g., due to censorship-. There is a famous Francoist 
censorship case regarding Casablanca:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0034583/quotes
http://es.youtube.com/watch?v=yayv6_8mwl4

Renault says "/in 1935, you ran guns to Ethiopia. In 1936, you fought in 
Spain, on the Loyalist side/"; however, the Francoist regime translated 
it as "/in 1935, you ran guns to Ethiopia. In *1938*, you fought *as 
much as you could against Austrian Anschluss*/", obviously distorting 
it. Well, it perverts the essence of the original work -it doesn't mean 
the same as it did anymore-, and I also think that such perversion has 
nothing to do with commercial issues.
> But then came the internet, and changed all of this - suddenly there 
> is a huge demand for sufficiently good unofficial translations for 
> works that are not and probably never will be translated with approval 
> of the author and at the same time there are an enormous number of 
> people willing to do all this work for free. It is in the nature of 
> culture to spread.
Still the author of an intellectual work is able to complain against a 
bad translation which distort the meaning of his work and say "/I didn't 
mean that/". Casablanca & Francoism's was only an example, there are 
tons of them.
> I fail to see an artist's rational interest in wanting to weed out 
> unofficial translations that are mostly found only by those looking 
> for them, because nobody is actively promoting the material.
I think wanting one's work not to be distorted nor censored is a pretty 
rational interest.
> I don't think anyone consciously seeking out unofficial translations 
> will think of them as representative of the original author's talent 
> or person.
People in Spain thought for years that Rick Blaine actually /fought/ 
Nazis in Austria in 1938, when actually he was /fighting/ Nationals in 
Spain in 1936; maybe it was due to Spanish being naive -they might have 
realized that Rick was a fictional character :)-, maybe it was due to 
being under a dictatorship, maybe due to both and/or other reasons. The 
thing is that it was, it happened, censorship was applied to 
Casablanca's Spanish soundtrack. Regards,


                                                                                                    
Carlos Ayala
                                                                                                     
( Aiarakoa )

                                                                             
Partido Pirata National Board's Chairman