Dear friends:

Today we commemorate World Book and Copyright Day I received a recommendation from the Fundación del Español Urgente Fundéu which I transcribe verbatim as follows:

“Copyright is author’s rights. The anglicism copyright, which means ‘right to exploit and reproduce an intellectual, artistic or scientific work’, can be translated into Spanish as derechos de autor or derechos de edición. However, if for some reason the English term copyright is preferred, it should be used in italics, or in quotation marks if that typeface is not available.”

As a translator specialized in Industrial and Intellectual Property, I differ a lot from what he says on this occasion, even though in many other occasions I think his nuances are very accurate. Mine today is that Copyright is NOT the same as Author’s Rights, because they are terms that come from two different legal spheres, the Napoleonic in the first case and the Anglo-Saxon in the second.

Without mentioning articles of the corresponding laws, just by stripping both terms we can see that Copyright protects the copy of the work rather than the author, while author’s rights direct their protection towards the author and not the work. They are different ways of looking at life, they are parts of our neuronal system that have different priorities, that is why I differ from what Fundéu says. Moreover, in the Spanish case, the concept is expressed in the plural: copyright and it makes sense, since it protects both economic or exploitation rights and moral rights.

What I do agree with is to italicize the term Copyright, of course, like any foreign entry in our language. In any case, I would translate Copyright into English by Author’s Rights and not by Copyright because of what I have just explained.

I hope you have a good day reading millions of translations, because many of you will read just that, translations of originals, so today, translators, I think we have to celebrate our day a little bit too.