Sunday, July 02, 2023

Department of Cherchez l’Argent

 
So, in order not to lose the information that I shared yesterday in a thread of tweets on the bird site, in response to a provocatively wide-ranging New York Times roundtable by Juliana Barbassa (“‘Building Something Together’: Translators on Their Art”) with Samantha Schnee, Allison Markin Powell, Jeremy Tiang, Mui Poopaksakul, and Bruna Dantas Lobato, I am putting it here in a blog post, for perpetuity, so to speak. 

The subject, to be clear, is how state funding influences the translation of literary works into English, and specifically how a few European languages, with heavy state backing, dominate. I will leave it to others to expound on this (including the ways in which this represents legacies of colonialism, imperialism, the Cold War, etc.) and in fact look forward to that!  

To recapitulate, then, reading the roundtable, I had many thoughts—so many that I got overwhelmed, because everyone in the interview said things I thought were important and worthy of commenting on. Writing a thread on Twitter takes a long time, though, and I was conscious of not wanting to spend too much (unpaid) time on that, given my current work obligations, so I limited myself to commenting on just one point one of the participants made with a fairly bare-bones thread of data on just one language to illustrate the point.  

That point was to uplift what Jeremy Tiang said about translation in English not being a level playing field: 

JEREMY: I want to mention the unevenness of the playing field, which might not be apparent to people outside of the translation world.  

Someone working from, say, German could quite feasibly, if they were sufficiently established, make a living simply by waiting for publishers to come to them with German books to translate. Whereas with less represented languages or regions, the translator often has to advocate for the book or it doesn’t get translated at all. Thai literature in English translation pretty much wouldn’t exist if Mui weren’t finding these books and putting them in front of publishers. 


What I wrote in my Twitter thread was that to say the playing field is uneven is an understatement. As I noted there, I don’t have the data at hand on the amounts of the funding, but to illustrate beyond the example that Jeremy gives, which is about German, the dominance of translations from French is in large part a result of the French state's funding to subsidize translations. 

To give readers a sense of the extent of this funding, I shared this post from Three Percent, the blog by Chad Post, publisher of Open Letter, who has written consistently about these matters over the years and who remains a great source of information on data concerning publishing of fiction translation in the United States. As I noted in my tweet, that post is from 2008, so the information isn’t current, but it serves to give an idea of the extent of French state funding to support the translation of French fiction into English in the U.S. market. 

Again, as I noted on Twitter, the dominance of French fiction of course also has to do with US (and UK) editors’ familiarity with French language and culture, which in turn similarly results from funding (for example, of French departments and teacher training). But state financial support of translations, in all the ways noted in Chad’s blog post, is still the biggest factor (or at least so I believe; perhaps impossible to prove).

Here note that I put UK in parentheses above. This is because the market for fiction translated into English is not only in the United States, but also in the United Kingdom, and in fact elsewhere around the world—these days more than ever, including not only India (English translations of most of the literature written in the many languages of that country are published in India itself, since US and UK publishers have been slow/reluctant to acquire them), but also many other, smaller countries whose fiction, for many reasons (again, possibly ranging from the subject matter or style not being considered interesting by US or UK publishers, to the lack of state subsidies for translated works) has not been published in large numbers in the US or UK. 

Below I present some recent data to illustrate just how dominant French is in the US market for fiction translated into English. Note that these are US data only, and do not include books published in the UK or elsewhere. The data come from the Translation Database, “founded in 2008 by Three Percent and Open Letter Books at the University of Rochester to track all original publications of fiction and poetry published in the U.S. in English translation.” (Note my caveat that not all the books translated from French are from France, so not all of them are eligible for the funding I refer to above.) 

2022 70
2021 100
2020 134 
2019 145
2018 133

To give readers an idea of just how dominant these figures are, I offered a comparison with the other members of FIGS (French, Italian, German, Spanish, borrowing a usage from Anton Hur): 

Italian
2022 32
2021 34
2020 41
2019 46
2018 48 

German
2022 29
2021 40
2020 70
2019 73
2018 74

Spanish
2022 70
2021 90
2020 86
2019 101
2018 123

Then I offered, for further comparison, a few other languages:

Chinese   
2022 17
2021 23 
2020 22  
2019 28
2018 33

Japanese
2022 29
2021 23 
2020 33  
2019 47
2018 64

Korean   
2022 12
2021 11 
2020 15  
2019 17
2018 11

(Here, a Slavic section . . .) 

Russian 
2022 13
2021 10 
2020 18  
2019 28
2018 25

Ukrainian 
2022 3
2021 4
2020 5
2019 5
2018 4

Polish
2022 5
2021 13
2020 10 
2019 9
2018 16

Czech
2022 1
2021 7
2020 3
2019 4
2018 9

And, finally (though, as I pleaded on Twitter, fearing in advance that people would complain I left out other important examples, please don’t harsh on me for not being exhaustive), I offered the six biggest languages of India (in my thread I mistakenly said five)—and though I neglected to mention it on Twitter, these all have over 55 million speakers(!), and that’s only counting people who speak them as their first language, which means they are larger than every country in Europe except Germany, the UK, France, and Italy

Hindi
2022 0
2021 0
2020 0 
2019 1 
2018 1
 
Bengali 
2022 0
2021 1
2020 2
2019 3
2018 4

Marathi
2022 0
2021 0
2020 0
2019 0
2018 0

Telugu (no entries)

Tamil
2022 1
2021 0
2020 0
2019 2
2018 2

Gujarati
2022 1
2021 0
2020 0
2019 0
2018 0

In my Twitter thread, I repeated my caveat that I was aware of the limitations of the data I was sharing and that my goal was just to give an idea of the disproportion to people who may have never thought about it before. (In other words, not a thread for the hardcore!)

As of this writing, there have been two replies I want to include, one from the new not-for-profit publishing house trace, who noted that “US comp lit programs rooted in postwar & cold war politics” were another reason for the unequal distribution of literature in English translation and that that was a motivation for their launching the press (“despite the HUGE challenges in funding”) and the other from translator Shaun Whiteside, who noted, absolutely correctly, that Germany also offers “v[ery] generous” funding to support translation into English of fiction written in German.  

So, there you have it. Now, if you want, you can bookmark this blog post, and the info won’t be lost on Twitter. 😊

Thursday, June 14, 2018

Petra Hůlová on “women’s” and “men’s” writing

Panel on Vaculík, Mácha and Hakl
by Petra Hůlová

Originally published June 1, 2018, at iLiteratura.cz: http://www.iliteratura.cz/Clanek/39993/  


“I’ll agree to take part in discussions about ‘women’s writing’ just as soon we start talking about ‘men’s writing,’” Slovak novelist Svetlana Žuchová told me.

“They said 300 euros was the fixed fee for author appearances, and they were sorry but they couldn’t raise it. After the event, though, I found out in talking with two of the male participants that, unlike me, they got 400 euros,” German writer Tanja Dückers shared with me.

“None of the most famous translators of Czech to English—[Michael Henry] Heim, [Peter] Kussi, or Paul Wilson—has translated a single book by a Czech woman,” said US translator of Czech literature Alex Zucker, adding, “We see the same huge disparity in women writers translated by women as we do by men.”

Three days, three quotes, three conversations with people close to me about women and literature week before last. All three demonstrate that the situation is more complicated than it’s usually presented: either as a matter of chauvinism or as a problem that doesn’t really exist. With regard to these three quotes, that means:

1. This isn’t necessarily about objecting to the term “women’s writing,” but the fact that it has no conceptual parallel. Yet all kinds of questions spring to my mind on the subject of “men’s writing.” For instance: female characters in male writing who generate ideas rather than relationships or libido. I’m burning with curiosity.

2. Why it is that women get on average 25% less than men for the same work has always been a mystery to me. It really never occurred to me that lower pay might sometimes be “just” a result of the fact that women have less self-confidence and tend to accept whatever they’re offered. This became clear after Tanja Dückers publicly shared her experience of being paid a lower fee for her appearance in Berlin, and then other women authors spoke out about similar experiences. We’re familiar with the shibboleth of fixed fees in the Czech literary world, too. Here, though, it’s often a gender-equal fee of nothing, spiced up with the quip that it’s “good for your PR.”

3. It isn’t men who are to blame, but a way of thinking on the part of everyone involved — ergo Zucker’s observation that women translators, too, often translate primarily men, entirely of their own choice. Zucker, on the other hand, is aiming to focus on translating women. The interest in translating women authors in the U.S. was unleashed by author and translator Alison Anderson’s text “Where Are the Women in Translation?”, published in Words Without Borders in May 2013, leading to the Women in Translation Month initiative and a series of “books by women we’d love to see in English.” It’s great to have women authors being prioritized, especially when it comes to English translations of Czech literature, where the percentage of women comes nowhere near the percentage of works being published by women in Czech every year. Still, at its core, I don’t think this disparity is a result of the widely held view that women write worse. The problem is that women are still often seen as a group with a particular outlook, based on their shared “femininity,” whereas men are considered individuals, representing only themselves, their fictional worlds reflecting gender-neutral, universal human themes. Male authors are just people writing about the world, which logically is going to appeal to people the most.
It’s similar to when you ask someone to draw you a person. They’re probably not going to draw a woman. That would be too specific. So, what if instead of focusing on discrimination against women’s literature, we were to think about what’s typical for the category of “men’s writing”? Just as an exercise. On a panel where women would be assertive enough to push for a higher “fixed” fee, we could analyze the specifics of the masculine vision for some random trio of authors—say, [Ludvík] Vaculík, [Karel Hynek] Mácha and [Emil] Hakl. From a purely literary point of view, no emotions involved.

Translated from the Czech by Alex Zucker

Thursday, June 01, 2017

Translators, Rates, Money, and Unions

[Note: Not long ago, PEN America migrated its website to a new platform, and a few articles and features of the site were lost in the shuffle. Since currently the PEN site is the only place this transcript is posted, I am reposting it here, for safekeeping.]

TRANSCRIPT OF THREE PERCENT PODCAST NO. 91: “TRANSLATORS, RATES, MONEY, AND UNIONS”