To explain just how much translation work is suppressed by copyright restrictions, I often use the example of my book Producing Open Source Software, published in 2005, by O'Reilly Media, a traditional publishing house that is willing to experiment with non-restrictive licensing terms.
I asked O'Reilly if we could use a completely free license (the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license), so as to be consistent with the book's topic, open source software. They agreed, and when the book was published, I put its full text online under open copyright.
Within a year, there were about 20 translators working on translations into several languages. Today, three and a half years later, there are about 70 translators working in twelve languages. Four of the translations (German, Japanese, French, Dutch) are completed and in maintenance mode, while the Spanish translation is close to being complete. The Dutch translation has also been published commercially in book form by the publishing house SURFnet, who paid the translators to guarantee completion — a good example of how business models are better enabled through freedom than through restriction. I recently got an email from the French translators saying that they will probably be publishing their translation commercially too.
The key point is, this is all for a rather niche book. The English original sells in the low thousands of copies. In other words, my completely minor, inconsequential little book attracted scores of translators and is now translated into at least four languages, soon to be five.
How can this be, when so many more important books go untranslated?
The answer is that most potential translations are suppressed. When I stand in a bookstore lately, surrounded by volumes, I nonetheless see the shelves as mostly bare. Most of the books that could be there are not: they would be translations of books from other languages, if only copyright law didn't prevent the translations from being made — except for those rare cases where the copyright holder deemed it worth the trouble to negotiate an agreement with one particular translator, who would then have a monopoly on the translation rights, whether or not the translation is actually done or is any good.
The fact that my very minor book was so widely translated, and that most open source and public domain texts are also widely translated, is proof that spontaneous translation will happen in general, if only it is allowed to. Creating greater public awareness of this fact, and of the number of books we won't see in a bookstore under the current monopoly system, is part of QuestionCopyright.org's mission.