Capt. Mondo's World o' Mondo-ness

My Name is ???? ???????-???????
...but you can call me ????.

No, I haven't suddenly started to speak Russian, but I had a pleasant surprise the other evening after finishing teaching my Information Architecture class at the University when I got home and was presented with a mystery box that had been delivered by FedEx earlier in the day. When I opened it up it turned out to contain multiple copies of my last Core CSS book translated into Russian.

Cover of the translated version of Core CSS, 2nd Edition, published by Williams Publishing

This isn't the first time this sort of thing has happened -- one of my previous books, The Advanced HTML Companion was translated into Japanese, and a similar box of books (with a wildly different cover from the original English edition) came to me in the mail without any hint beforehand. This was from a different publisher, but the process was the same: no consultation with the author beforehand with regard to doing the translation, it is just done. The contracts stipulate that I get several copies of new editions of the book, otherwise I would never know, save perhaps for a line item in by bi-annual royalty statements from the publisher.

I find this approach a bit surprising since I likely could have helped out, such as helping re-produce some of the screen shots that use Cyrillic text -- I don't honestly know whether they actually took new screenshots in the target browsers, or just Photoshop-ed everything.

Just before putting my daughters to bed we searched for their names as rendered in Cyrillic text, since I had acknowledged them both, along with my wife and various people who helped out technically with the production of the book. They both thought that their names looked "funny" written in Cyrillic.

A pleasant and unexpected surprise, and while I know the publisher is attempting to eek out the most possible profit from the book, I am still chuffed to see my name in Cyrillic on a book I wrote.