On Fri, 14 Nov 2003 05:48:21 +0900, matt@gol.com (Matthew Endo)
belched the alphabet and kept on going with:

>I have a question regarding translation work and copyright issues.
>
>For example, there is a technical manual copyrighted by the manufacturer
>of the item.  If you translate the English into Japanese, who owns the
>copyright of the Japanese version?
>
>What are the issues involved?

My understanding of it is that there are two sorts of rights involved
here. The translator owns the rights to the translation, unless there
is some agreement giving those rights over to someone else. But the
translator can't do diddly-squat with the translation without the
permission of the copyright holder of the original. Intellectual
property transcends such mundanities as language. Since in a
translation the intellectual property content would (presumably) match
that of the original, then the owner of the original still maintains
rights to it. The translator gets rights to his target language
rendition of it. Neither the owner of the original nor a third party
can rip off your translation just because you don't own the rights to
the original intellectual content. Unless there is some sort of
agreement between the two parties you sort of end up with a Mexican
standoff. They can't use your translation, and neither can you.

That comes from spending an entire evening googling around and wading
through countless mind-numbing pages on international copyright law.
When I got through, the above was the understanding I brought away
from it. Of course, there exists the very strong possibility that, as
in so many other cases, I am entirely full of shit on this.