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Psst! It's a ©

Dan Brown's latest novel, The Lost Symbol, was released on September 15.

His last book, The Da Vinci Code, was wildly popular in China and propelled translations of his earlier novels onto bestseller lists as well. The latest thriller, which follows the further adventures of intrepid symbologist Robert Langdon, should sell well over here too.

Once it's translated, that is. People's Literature Publishing House expects a Chinese edition to be on shelves sometime in 2010.

Chinese Internet users can't wait that long, so Yeeyan, a collaborative translation website, has launched a project to crowd-source the translation of The Lost Symbol into Chinese. They've already posted the prologue and the first two chapters.

"Will translating The Lost Symbol without authorization break the law?" asks translator Lao Gan in a post on Yeeyan's forums:

This hasn't happened yet, but we can borrow from a previous example. Looking at the Harry Potter novels may provide inspiration.

Internet users translated the later Harry Potter novels far in advance of the publication of the authorized translations, and crowd-sourced translation is frequently harnessed for putting subtitles on films and TV shows that have not been officially released on the Chinese mainland.

But Yeeyan's well-organized project is vastly different from non-commercial translations done by groups of fans, writes Janson Yao in a stern blog post. Yao, himself a professional translator, sees Yeeyan as benefiting from its brazen infringement on Dan Brown's intellectual property: