For decades, book translators in the U.S. have been underpaid and largely ignored. But translators are now beating the drum for their own visibility. kiracecilia_ reports
Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos by Publishers It’s strange that the literature of a language that rubs up against so many others should be as wary of translation as English is. For English speakers, there seems to be an expectation that the entire world should be instantly legible, and if it isn’t, that it be brought in seamlessly and domesticated.
Which is perhaps why, when you’re reading a translation into English, you probably don’t fully know whose book you’re reading: Translators’ bylines are almost never on the cover of the books they translate. And unless you have a vested interest in the industry, you’re unlikely to scrutinize the colophon. You might not even register that a translated book is a translation at all, and it would seem that some publishers prefer it that way.
As the grande dame of Portuguese and Spanish translation, Margaret Jull Costa, has said, without the author, there is no translator. When I work on a novel or a short story in my role as a translator from Swedish into English, I don’t make up the plot, the characters, the tension. Still, the non-Swedish-speaking reader can only experience those elements through the words I choose, in a kind of collaboration across time — between the author’s mind and mine.
It’s difficult to directly measure the campaign’s success. But it is clear that things have shifted: In 2016, the International Booker Prize announced that it would now focus on translations only and split the prize sum equally between author and translator.
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