Tenga la bendad para ayudame
March 8th, 2026 | Ramblings
That’s my high school Spanish from memory. Probably spelled wrong too. It was intended to be – Have the kindness to help me. My Spanish is sufficient to order in a Tex-Mex restaurant or call out for help from where I’ve fallen in a ditch.
Amazon recently offered to translate my books into Spanish and I did those that were eligible. A few days in the response is underwhelming. If any of you are native speakers and can report how well they translated my books please tell me when you stop laughing.
Oh, they are supposed to add other languages. How about Hindi and Chinese? Now there’s a market to tap!
Can’t help with spanish but german maybe. I honestly would not buy them in german though only KU. it is my native language but pretty much everything i read or watch is in english. It usually annoys me when amazon rwcommends me a german version of a book i own in english (i have over a thousand books and none of them are in german). Almost as annoying as recommendations for bundles of books i already own.
I can imagine your spanish readers might have a similiar mindset.
I can see several issues with those translations:
You still have typos in your books. “pubic mandate” from April 5 comes to mind and Persico/Perisco is mixed up on multiple occasions. Abbreviations and multiple languages you are using for titles might also be an issue. Names like ISSII could also cause issues. ISS-II or ISS-2 might make that clearer. Even your narrator for the Family Law books got Delta-V once wrong with delta 5.
If you are still interested in fixing those typos I might keep an eye out on the next read through.
I’ll fix those for sure. Amazon even suggests I buy my own books. It amuses me when people fearfully say they know everything about us online but they can’t write the code to exclude the authors. And “We found something you might like.” is often things I’ve already bought. How many air fryers do they think I need?
I corrected the pubic but could not find Perisco in any current books.
I believe acronyms might be the biggest issue. Having read all your books multiple times and also listened to any audio versions available I noticed that LET was red as let in the AI read April among other acronym issues. While it didn’t bother me as an old hand I’m sure it would confuse new readers. An AI translation would be problematic. Wishing you every success with translations as a new endeavour.
I am glad to hear that your books will spread to other languages and I hope to hear of another book in both series
Well, the next Family Law book is 3/4 done. Thanks
YAY!
The Spanish version of Family Law is quite interesting but challenging. I hope you get reactions from various regions of Spanish speakers. Apparently, Mexico City Spanish has been exported in dubbed films and daytime serial romances. That likely means aim for Mexico City word usage as the most common variant. Personally, the Spanish version stretches my vocabulary, thank goodness for quick word lookup built into Kindle.
Thank you. I really wondered if it was any good. My English versions can be vocabulary challenging too. I had a lady teaching English at the university level tell me she was shocked she learned a couple of new words reading my books. She didn’t expect that. I may be a horrible grammarian but I know a lot of words! Since I went deaf I find my pronunciation of words I only read instead of hear has deteriorated. I made a nurse laugh on a recent visit because I tend to insert a few extra letters in a word of things like a drug name. Oh well…
Mackey Hi! Sitearm (handle) here. I have just finished my my third reread of your April and Family series. Please post if and when you are working on more books.
Best regards,
Site
Family Law 9 is past 95k words. It’s slow going at near 79 years old and lots of other things needing done.
Unfortunately, I don’t speak Spanish.
But I have to say that nowhere on the German Amazon site does it say that it’s a machine translation. I think that should be disclosed before purchase.
My mistake, I overlooked it.
totally agree
There are a bunch of LitRPG books on Amazon (KU) translated from Russian. Whether by machine I don’t know . They read OK but have odd cultural moments where the translation avoids saying something like “To Moscow” and says “to the nearby capital city”.
Your novels would not be pretending to be based anywhere but in the USA or orbit (I simplify, having read them all!) so would not have that issue.
Yeah, pretty much US/ orbit, but other countries are named. That’s interesting.