If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Call for Translators (for Supplementary Materials)
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Why the interest in a Dutch translation? Virtually every well-educated native Dutch speaker is also able to speak and read English very well and (low confidence in the following suggestion) there might even be a broad preference for the original English for non-fiction works on technical topics amongst native Dutch speakers.
Is it just for completeness since the publisher is going to produce a Dutch translation of the book regardless?
I suspect that a lot of Dutch people would still prefer to read in Dutch. I know a lot of (well-educated) Dutch people who certainly CAN speak and read English, but reading a whole book is a decent chore, since they don't read things in English all that often.
1Yes to completeness. Additionally, the publishers won’t include QR codes to an English-language website in print editions in non-English languages, so we get more links to the website in the book if we have a version of the site in that language.
That said, we still may not do all of them. It would have any benefit at all to make the Dutch version exist, so if someone’s excited to help us with it, we may as well let them know it’s useful!
But in the world where we’re cutting languages, Dutch (and Bulgarian) are likely lower priority (although no calls have been made here yet, since we’re not quite sure how hard it will be to make them exist!).
I am now curious about the omission of French, hoping that's because you already have competent people for it, maybe the aforementioned kind souls?
The book is not yet slated to be translated into French. From the OP:
There will also likely be more translations in the future (the above list is not exhaustive); publishers in some markets prefer to wait until after the English edition is published to decide whether or not to produce a localization.
1Was about to ask the same for German, seems like the wording here is not particulary clear. Please correct me if I misunderstood: You need translations for those 8 languages listed, as the book will be translated into those. You will need other translations later, once publishers decide to do other translations.
1The short answer is that they’re not. Accurate translation of nuanced material is a subtle discipline, and we really don’t want to send thousands of people to websites with hundreds of pages worth of content we can’t even verify that we endorse.
Some professional translators use LLMs to accelerate their work, and it doesn’t make sense for us to explicitly ban this, but the important part is having multiple skilled sets of eyes on both the original and the translation, and many people who might otherwise volunteer a pure-LLM workflow don’t meet that bar.
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