Sunday, October 18, at the
39th annual conference of the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA), held in Oakland, CA, I moderated a roundtable titled “Beyond #namethetranslator: New Forms of Translator Advocacy,” with (in alphabetical order) Megan Berkobien, Sean Bye, Marcia Lynx Qualey, and Deborah Smith.
What follows here is 1) a description of the genesis of the roundtable, to explain the ideas behind it, which may be useful in understanding the discussion we ended up having; and 2) the contributions to the roundtable from each of us, in some cases with additional material based on the notes we prepared in advance, plus e-mails between us, plus notes I jotted down during the event.
Although several of us participating in this roundtable belong to organizations, none of our statements should be taken to imply endorsement of our ideas by the organizations we belong to. We all appeared here as individual translators, speaking on behalf of no one but ourselves. This post is intended solely to share with a wider audience the ideas, questions, and concerns that were raised.
Where It Came From
The idea for the roundtable came initially from Deborah, who emailed me in April 2016 to say that she’d be attending this year’s ALTA conference and asking if I’d like to take part in a panel on the name-the-translator movement, similar to one she moderated at this year’s “LBF -1,” the gathering of the UK Translators Association that takes place every year on the day before the London Book Fair opens.
That discussion focused on the use of the hashtag
#namethetranslator to call out (or call in) publications and reviewers who fail to name the translator in their reviews of translated works: Has it been effective in bringing about an increase of translator mentions, thereby raising recognition of the art of translation, boosting the “visibility” of translators, and beyond that, helping translators earn more pay?
After a week of heavy correspondence between me and Deborah about how best to frame the discussion, we decided to place the emphasis of the ALTA roundtable more on the question of pay and other material conditions, precisely because so many people, including translators themselves, tend to tiptoe around them. Along the way our description from the roundtable evolved from
#namethetranslator: Is That the Best We Can Do?
Translators have sought for years to have their names mentioned in reviews. Twitter’s #namethetranslator hashtag is just the latest version of this advocacy. But does it work? Or is it just sounding off? In general, are social media helping translators make progress on the issues that matter most to us? To what extent can and should publishers be engaging on our behalf?
to
#namethetranslator: Is That the Best We Can Do?
Translators have sought for years to have their names mentioned in reviews. Twitter’s #namethetranslator hashtag is just the latest version of this advocacy. But does it work? Or is it just sounding off? To what extent can and should publishers be engaging on our behalf? In general, are social media helping translators make progress on the issues that matter most to us? Is it time for us to start talking about the elephant in the room: how much we are paid? How do we do so, given that we don’t have a union?
These issues have taken up a lot of my time and headspace during the two and a half years I’ve served as cochair of the
PEN America Translation Committee, and it was important to me for the discussion to be forward-looking, not just about what has been done, but what else can be done that no one has tried yet, so I suggested we invite Marcia Lynx Qualey, who is currently one of the most outspoken advocates for translation and translators, via
her blog and
Twitter, and in her dozens upon dozens of
articles for other publications.
I also emailed a few other translators who are active on Twitter, but none of them was able to attend ALTA, and at that point we needed to submit the proposal, so we went with what we had, knowing we could add more participants in the time between submission and finalization. In February I had learned that Julia Sanches and Sean Bye were starting a translators collective in New York City, modeled after actors’ collectives in London, which offer budding actors a way to find work without needing to belong to an established actors’ agency. (One of their main motivations was the fact that, unlike authors, who have little chance of publishing a book unless they have an agent, very few translators are represented by agents, since the money we make is generally too little to be “worth it.”) So we invited one of them to take part, and Sean accepted. Meanwhile Meg Berkobien, a Ph.D. student in Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan and a translator of Catalan, saw on the ALTA website that our roundtable was still seeking participants, and she wrote to say that she had started an emerging translators collective with the aim of developing a collaborative publication model—and one that keeps in mind the many unpaid labors associated with the craft of translation—for emerging translators.
That gave us a full lineup with lots of exciting ideas, and then, in the course of another few weeks of correspondence among the five of us, we agreed on our final roundtable description:
Beyond #namethetranslator: New Forms of Translator Advocacy
For decades translators have sought to have reviewers mention their names. Twitter’s #namethetranslator hashtag is just the latest version of this advocacy. But does it work? Or is it just sounding off? To what extent should publishers be engaging on our behalf? In general, are social media helping translators make progress on the issues that matter most to us? Is it time for us to start talking about the elephant in the room: how much we are paid? How do we do so, given that we don’t have a union?
How It Went
We spoke in the order Alex, Marcia (via Skype), Sean, Meg, Deborah, followed by a discussion among the roundtablists and then questions from the translators in the audience.
Alex:
Thank you all for coming.
In our roundtable today we’re going to start by taking a look back at some of the origins of the advocacy we have now, and then move on to examples of new ways to advance the interests of translators, specifically literary translators.
I also want to emphasize that advocating for translators is not the same thing as advocating for translation. In fact I would urge you to keep this in mind whenever you hear someone say they are advocates for translation. Stop for a moment and ask yourself: How does this benefit translators? Does it help us materially? Does it contribute to our earning a living, or at least a fair wage?
This suggests that when I say “advocacy” I have in mind money. Which both is and isn’t true. I like talking about money because most people don’t like to talk about it. I mean, I actually don’t like to, but as an advocate I feel I need to, since almost nobody else does.
One of the words you hear a lot in connection with translator advocacy is “visibility.” This suggests our efforts should be aimed mainly at ensuring people—especially readers and reviewers—know that we exist; understand our work, appreciate it, recognize its importance, and our essential, in fact irreplaceable role in creating and shaping what is known as “international literature.” It is an outward-aimed advocacy—that is, aimed outside of the publishing industry, which is interesting, given that if we want to be paid more, you would think we’d be aiming our efforts at publishers (and, possibly, agents and/or acquiring editors—and, we can come back to this, authors).
Let’s start in the present and work backwards: The
#namethetranslator hashtag is used on Twitter to draw attention to publications and reviewers who fail to name or mention the translator in their reviews of translations. As it says on the
website of the Society of Authors in the UK: “An author’s name is their brand, and failure to properly credit any author lessens their ability to make a living from their work.” Before I go on, note that this language suggests the underlying issue here is pay—more specifically, the ability to earn one’s living.
The Society of Authors site
names Helen Wang of the Translators Association as originator of the hashtag. In fact advocacy on this issue dates back over 50 years! I’m not going to give a full history, but there are a few key moments I’d like to share.
PEN America’s Translation Committee was founded in 1959,* at the initiative of novelist and short-story writer
Beatrice Chute, then president of PEN American Center (she preferred to be called by her middle name, Joy, and went by the pen name “B. J. Chute”). She served as president from 1959 to 1961, and, as she said in her contribution to the May 1970 conference on literary translation organized by the PEN American Center in New York, she got the idea to form a committee on translation after hearing a report from Theodore Purdy on the
First International Meeting of Translators of Literary Works, held in Warsaw & Krakow, Poland, July 2–8, 1958.
* ALTA was founded
in 1978; the ATA
in 1959, its Literary Division
in 1985; the Translators Association was established
in 1958.
At the outset of the
1958 meeting in Poland, there was a resolution put forward, stating:
Literary translators and their organizations in all countries shall immediately launch a widespread campaign—by way of articles in the press, discussions and so on—to inculcate an appreciation among the general public of the importance and cultural value of the translator’s work. Literary translators and their organizations shall insist that publishers give clear and proper indication of the translator’s name in every book published in all catalogues, advertisements and so on. Literary translators and their organizations shall further, by all available means, strive to induce literary critics to include in their review an assessment of the work of the translator as co-author of the book presented by him to the public in his native language. In the event of a critic omitting reference to the translator, the translator himself or his organization shall without delay demand that the editor of the journal concerned accord him his right by publishing a notice, article or letter.
Notice the focus here is on “visibility.”
Chute decided to ask Purdy to be the first chair of the committee. Purdy was one of two reps of American PEN to that 1958 meeting in Poland (and also one of the founders of the American Translators Association). According to
one article, he was “competent in eight languages” and worked for Macmillan, where he was responsible for acquiring the first novel by a Latin American author to go into multiple printings in the US (
Crossroads, L. C. Kaplan’s 1943 translation from Portuguese of
Caminhos Cruzados by Brazilian author Érico Veríssimo).
In May 1970, the PEN American Center organized a conference on literary translation in New York. The proceedings were later published under the title
The World of Translation, and in her remarks, “The Necessity of Translation,” B. J. Chute said/wrote:
If I were asked to sum up in one word my reason for feeling that a Translation Committee was essential to the American Center of P.E.N.—quite apart from the obvious fact that P.E.N. is an international organization and therefore exists through translated relationships—I think that the word I would use is “climate.” For translation to flourish in this or any other country as it should (as it must), an ideal climate would supply certain basic necessities: recognition of the fact that the translator is indispensable; appreciation of the difficulty of his role (that it is an art as well as a craft); proper financial return for his labors, and credit given where credit is due. [boldface emphasis added]
Note that here, along with recognition and visibility, Chute refers to money: “proper financial return for his labors.” In its first 10 years, the PEN American Center’s Translation Committee established the
Translation Prize (1963), issued a
Manifesto on Translation (1969, under Robert Payne’s tenure as Translation Committee chair), and began work on a Minimum Basic Contract. Then, in 1970, it put together “this conference of distinguished translators from many countries”—which I am quoting from here.
Still from her comments at the 1970 conference, B. J. Chute says/writes:
Since 1960, I have pursued a small but vigorous personal project, which is represented in my files by a folder marked “Editors and Publishers, Harassment of.” This file is concerned with matters of translation, and most of it consists of correspondence—sometimes brief and sometimes lengthy—which has taken place between a publisher or editor and myself on those numerous occasions when the name of the translator has been omitted from either the book jacket or the advertising—carrying the invisible profession to its logical conclusion.
Chute goes on to describe some of the letters she wrote, and responses, noting that she had general success. (I won’t go into it here, so as not to dwell on the past, but one interesting side note: In those days, the Translation Committee didn’t consist of just translators, but also publishers and editors—who, as Chute points out, have their problems too—and she notes that the committee owes a great deal of its success to their being involved. Maybe this is something we can come back to.)
The effort Chute began in 1960 eventually died out, though I wasn’t able to verify how many years she carried it on beyond 1970, when she made the comments I quote above. In 1983, during
Peter Glassgold’s term as Translation Committee cochair, the effort was reborn with the
formation of the Watchdog Subcommittee, and carried through until 2012, when it disbanded, mainly due to its limited effectiveness (also, at a certain point the name was dropped because of its aggressive connotations).
Margaret Carson, who served as Translation Committee cochair with me in 2014–15, shared with me this mission statement for the Watchdog Subcommittee, created during her involvement with it in 2008:
When a translator’s work is ignored in a review, when a translator’s name does not appear on a book cover, or when an advertisement or catalogue makes no mention of a translator, translators everywhere have been ignored. No less than authors, translators deserve to be accorded the notice their creative work merits.
The PEN Translation Committee’s Watchdog Campaign monitors book reviews and publishers’ promotional material to see if translators have been given sufficient acknowledgement. It will contact book reviewers, editors and publishers when a translator’s contribution to a creative work has been ignored.
Its goals are to increase the visibility of translators and to encourage publishers and editors to acknowledge the act and the art of translation in the promotion of titles and in reviews.
Apparently, then, a reversion to emphasizing visibility over pay or the ability to earn a living.
THESIS: Although its goal is to help ensure translators can earn a living from their work, the question is whether naming the translator is enough. Or, more specifically, given the low number of translators devoted to advocacy and the limited amount of time and energy we all have, is it the best place to focus our efforts? Since not everyone has equal amounts of time, maybe some of us should focus on that, but what else can be done, especially on the issue that is so often the elephant in the room—namely, how much, or how little, we are paid?
Especially now, in the age of the internet, when so many publications exist also, or even solely online, it has come to be taken for granted that a certain amount of work should be done for free: for “exposure,” or because the publication itself pleads poverty. This is a whole topic in itself, pay and labor, but I think that sets the stage well for the issues we want to look at today.
•
Marcia Lynx Qualey, dynamic force behind the blog
Arabic Literature (in English) and an all-around champion of translation, joining us today via Skype
•
Sean Bye, translator of Polish,
program director of literature and humanities at the Polish Cultural Institute,
cofounder of the Cedilla & Co. translators’ collective
•
Meg Berkobien, translator of Catalan and Spanish,
doctoral student in Comp Lit at U of Michigan, founder of the
Emerging Translators Collective
•
Deborah Smith, Man Booker International
Prize-winning translator of Korean,
founder of Tilted Axis Press
Marcia:
Taking Alex’s lead, I’m going to talk very practically about what I do, not through the lens of advocacy for translation, but how it relates to advocacy for translators. And by this I mean making a living, and here there’s also how translation is valued (or not valued) in academia as to whether “counts” as a publication, but also less tangible aspects of translator community, collaboration, connections, and standing up for one another.
To start, I want to address a few of the particular
challenges for translators outside academia by paraphrasing something translator
Karim Traboulsi wrote on
International Translation Day. The profession is
dominated by women, which is almost certainly one of the reasons why it’s currently
undercompensated; as we know, undercompensation follows women. (But on the positive side, Karim said, it also tends to be very collaborative.) The profession has
few gatekeepers and an open door to
amateurs, which means it can be a more
diverse, global, and passionate field, but also can have the effect of
driving down payment, and sometimes
quality.
So these are some of the challenges & possibilities that I wanted to address.
What I wanted to focus on is what online spaces can and might be able to do to
change working conditions for translators. As Alex already mentioned, I edit a website called
ArabLit, which is one of a number of translation-focused online spaces. Not talking literary magazines, like
Asymptote or
Words Without Borders, but spaces for commentary & discussion. Some of these are generalized, like Lisa Carter’s very helpful
Intralingo, one of the few spaces that openly discusses money. Others are
language-focused, like Katy Derbyshire’s
Love German Books, or
ArabLit, or
Paper Republic. Still others are
semi-private spaces on Facebook, or are
campaigns like
#namethetranslator or
#WiTMonth or
#WorldKidLit.
So to
my particular project. When I opened ArabLit in 2009, I would never have thought it would be a daily occupation for the next seven years, which sometimes seems like a form of insanity. But a day or two after I opened it, translator
Shakir Mustafa emailed about how glad he was to see it. And it’s the feedback from translators (about needing a place to gather) that has kept it going for so long.
What does ArabLit do? Certainly, a website can
transmit information. But a few years ago, in a talk for Cairo’s
Center for Translation Studies, I said I saw the site less as a magazine, and more as a literary salon, with translators at the core.
Things an online space can or might be able to do:
- Share information.
- Foster community, discussion, and debate. This is not just to feel good, but also, in a practical sense, to create transparency. One of the difficult aspects of working as a freelancer, situation of many translators, is that you don’t often meet your co-workers, and so it becomes difficult to know if you’re being taken advantage of, if someone else is already working on A, B, C; how others are being compensated; how other people are dealing with rights; how invasive or helpful other publishers are; is it useful to go to the conference in X, Y, Z. Sometimes you don’t know the questions you could be asking until you hear from others.
- Give specific warnings. About treated unfairly by an agency or publisher.
- Answer specific questions. There’s a great closed Facebook group called Arabic↔English Literary Translators (arrows in both directions—very important). Mostly what it’s used for is to ask others’ opinions about the nuance of a phrase. Could expand to other questions.
- Direct attention to problems, as #namethetranslator and #WiTMonth have.
- Be more specific & transparent about money. Something that Intralingo has done in posting generally about money, talk more specifically in closed spaces, because a core part of being able to negotiate better is having more information. I think we overestimate information available to many emerging translators. Got a question – the author’s agent says the publisher won’t want to spend much on translation, so how little should I propose to do it for? Translators need more advocates.
- Making connections with other target-language translators. There is a lot we can learn here, in how our texts are translated and received in different target languages, and also in how different translators work.
- Foster more collective spaces, which is one of the things I think Meg is going to focus on.
Sean:
Cedilla & Co. came out of a discussion between me and Julia Sanches about why translators don’t have agents and why that model doesn’t seem to work—essentially, it seems like translators’ fees are so low that a commission model wouldn’t function. Our idea was, could a collective-style model work, where we would act as one another’s agents and in turn receive services, contacts, support, and representation instead of a commission?
Cedilla currently has nine members:
Allison Markin Powell,
Alta Price,
Heather Cleary,
Jeffrey Zuckerman,
Jeremy Tiang,
Julia Sanches,
Lissie Jaquette,
Marshall Yarbrough, and
myself. We cover ten languages: Arabic, Catalan, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, and Spanish. We are all based in New York and meet in person once every two weeks. We come from many different backgrounds, including publishing, agenting, editing, arts administration, and full-time translation.
For publishers, we offer translation services, readers’ reports, and “market intelligence”—all the commercially valuable info we gather about book markets, funding, promotion, audiences, etc. Our goal is to be a one-stop-shop for publishers wanting to do work in translation.
To our members, we offer intelligence and contact sharing, support in developing and making pitches, support in reviewing and negotiating contracts, a web presence, business cards, and branding/identity. We also pitch work on one another’s behalf. Our goal is for everyone to receive concrete services and support they would not have had working on their own.
Our goal is to work within the publishing industry to give ourselves more leverage in negotiation, expand our range of income sources, and provide a model of successful collaboration for other translators to replicate.
More information about Cedilla & Co. is available on our website:
www.cedilla.company. I encourage folks to check it out!
Meg:
I’m going to talk about the Emerging Translators Collective. We’re
just getting under way, but we imagine the ETC as a small “maker space” for translation in Ann Arbor, MI. I know the “craft” movement catches a lot of flak—all those hipsters making artisanal beer!—but I’m really fascinated by the more important questions of access and community that maker culture brings up. And there’s no question that translation is a craft in almost every respect. So, our answer to the question posed by this roundtable (what more can we do?) is: we want to think big & work small: more limited-edition short story chapbooks & broadsides, more paid translators. Our imagined hashtag is
#translatorslabor.
Maybe it’s best if I just read off our website’s “
About” page to start off.
Ahem: “The Emerging Translators Collective is a growing workshop and DIY micro-press dedicated to transforming the literary translator’s task through the use of alternative and collaborative publication models. Our members are, in general, early career translators who are interested in engaging translation as a literary, editorial, design, and production process. Instead of following the more traditional hierarchies involved with publishing a translation, we believe our texts will be best served through horizontal editorial and production processes. As a collective, we bring together a host of professional skills associated with the publishing sector, and we wish to develop this knowledge further by putting our hands to good work. By working together to create limited-edition, small-batch broadsides, folios, chapbooks, pamphlets, recorded performances, and other ephemera, and by offering decent honoraria for this labor, we advocate not only for translation in the abstract, but for the
translators and the necessary cultural exchange they make possible.”
In summary, we don’t see a huge divide between readers & makers because translators are intimately both. Also, and this is big, translators are customers. I’m pretty sure that my translator friends and I buy more books than the average bookstore-goer.
A big part of our effort is thinking about how to change the economic model to account for small translation projects (short stories, poem-prints, etc.) instead of the few big, paid projects (novels), but I’m still working that part out. I think this will be a really important question as more & more PhD programs ask students to plan on adjuncting & freelancing (editing/translating). For me, the plight of the adjunct and the translator (at least the emerging translator) share more similarities than differences at this point. You can probably guess that I’m super fun to be around when I get going on this subject . . .
Although the professors and translators here at UMichigan are generally progressive, I’ve had a few less-than-inspiring conversations about how much agency translators should have when discussing the economic side of things (“Be grateful!!”). What I realize more and more every day is that the whole “pay the writer” rhetoric affects different waves of translators (and grant-makers) in myriad ways. Whereas I find it refreshing to hear about labor-related topics, others might see it as, well, “whiny.” And maybe that’s because they’ve heard it before and haven’t seen any concrete change. For some it has gotten worse, I think. Listen, I personally don’t want to come across as whiny, nor do I want to offend potential allies, but I think there’s certainly room enough in our discourse about translation to be enthusiastic for conversations about labor and payment. I will not be made to feel bad for pursuing a profession that I’ve trained for. Sorry.
I know historically there has been a divide between academic and professional (or “commercial”) translators, but newer PhDs are much more invested in tearing this barrier down. Theory is important, but it has its limits. Ours is a project very much interested in getting translators paid, so it’s “commercial” in that way. We’ll be in limbo for the first couple of years, though, since it’s hard to apply for grants without three years of programming under your belt. We’re teaming up with the university because it provides funding and because we think that academia should support its younger translators more. The catch-22, though, is that we can’t pay our translators or sell our work. So, for the first year or so we’ll be doing more training than anything else.
When I first spoke to Alex about the Emerging Translators Collective, he brought up the fact that the general focus on translation can obscure the often difficult & precarious professional obstacles that translators face. I totally agree. While advocating for translation is an important part of raising awareness on behalf of translators, it might not change anything for translators in the material sense, and if it does, then not all that many translators. The goal isn’t to call anyone out or to minimize the stresses that traditional/indie publishers face, of course, but we have to broach the subject somehow.
When my translator pals & I have discussed the subject, most of us wonder how to make literary translation a more viable profession. When I think about the Emerging Translators Collective, the question becomes, How can a small operation support this kind of occupational support? My general answer is that it offers a small payment ($100) for short PRINT works (stories & poems) that might otherwise might just go up online for free (compensating us for our labor with nothing but “exposure”). It also offers training in DIY publishing & printing (letterpress, screen printing, etc.) and will work through a horizontal editing schema (made up of translators themselves). Unlike being a one-man show (which publishing can often be), the works we take on will be dictated by the member-translators themselves. I’d also like us to avoid the one-person decision-making model. Really,
Ugly Duckling Presse &
Matvei Yankelevich have been a real inspiration for me.
As founder of the ETC, I’ve spent a lot of time in the past year “researching” (buying & enjoying the work of!) almost every little press I can spot. When I bring back those publications to the group, it feels like I’m sharing treasure. There are so many wonderful publishing projects out there for English-language prose & poetry, and provocative models from abroad, like the presses involved in
editoriales cartoneras, we want to contribute by doing that for literature in translation. If we’re doing anything novel (which might really not be the case), it’s creating small editions/chapbooks/chaplets/broadsides of texts and paying translators for that work. You might think of
One Story mag, the
Belladonna Series,
Birds of Lace,
Goodmorning Menagerie, and
Greying Ghost press as some of the more adventurous ventures who’ve established these alternative models. We feature these presses and more on the “
Inspiration” page of our website, and we’ll be doing a
series of Twitter posts soon about the work we love, for members of the translation community who might not know the projects yet.
I hesitate to speak too much about the publishing world, especially because I’ve worked in the sphere of lit mags and have only gotten a glance at the independent publishing scene from within. On the other hand, both of my parents started their own stores, so I’ve been around “business” all of my life. Anyway, I think it’s safe to say that while traditional publishing has the capacity to facilitate translation in important ways, it also forecloses many of its radical possibilities. Even though editors and translators might work together on a translation, it ultimately has to shape up to certain expectations (I mean, apart from being quality writing). We can lament a lack of readers or money, sure, but I’m not sure how much of an immediate, material effect that will have. (And that’s not to say readerships aren’t important, but the best way to go about it is by educating students about translation from a young age.) Since the ETC emerged, in part, from the grad workshop in translation I cofounded with
Emily Goedde at the University of Michigan, we already had a well-oiled system for collaboration in place. So we thought, since so many of us have editing and design skills, since so many of us are interested in presswork, since so many of us are voracious readers in a wide range of languages, and since so many of us are working with quality mentors (like
Anton Shammas, for example), why don’t we take a chance and put out some of our own stuff? We’re all wearing a bunch of different hats, and we’re capitalizing on our shared skill sets. And, most importantly, we’re thinking about how to make translation more visible on/in the publication itself.
As for the magazines that publish translations but don’t pay the translators, it’s a really tough subject! Let me first acknowledge that so much important work comes out of these publications. They provide important visibility and CV lines. And even those that pay aren’t supplying a living wage (but who is??). That said, when I see big projects holding multiple $20,000 Kickstarter campaigns for their magazines while knowing that none of that money goes back to contributors or editors, I get a little miffed. And I’m not really sure that publishers are keeping tabs on what’s being put out, anyway. At a certain point, a CV line might not count for all that much. In any case, we really need to move past visibility for visibility’s sake because, let’s be honest, those who can really afford to translate on spec are few. For the rest of us, that means we’re driving ourselves bonkers trying to work a day job and get that work done in the hope that we’ll break through. But, break through to what? How can we make translation a sustainable profession and a diverse one? And falling back on that whole “well, translation is a labor of love” doesn’t solve all that much. It’s actually harmful rhetoric, as Miya Tokumitsu writes in her brilliant book
Do What You Love and Other Lies About Success and Happiness.
Anyway, at the center of it all is the idea of coming together and working with communities and projects that are already in place, I think. The thing that most inspires me, I think, is how many people were already interested in the various aspects of DIY publishing in Ann Arbor. And plenty of artists are willing to lend a helping hand with our training along the way.
Deborah:
Translator advocacy
• As a
publisher: At Tilted Axis Press we pay
the Society of Authors rate + royalty as standard, put the translator’s name on the front cover, list them alongside authors on our website, do our best to arrange publicity for the translator as well, promote whatever else they’re doing. (Plus, putting the translator’s name on the cover suggests that they’re a great writer.) Publicising the translator, giving them opportunities but not demanding that they do certain work for free. The royalty, though small, you hope acts as an incentive. Translators are central to what we do in that we source most of our titles through translators, are always open to suggestions from them. Publicising: say it loud, and people will assume that you’re saying it proud, that translation is something to shout about, a badge of quality, and that the translator themselves. Translation cult.
• Working with
emerging translators, and building continuous relationships. Guaranteeing a reliable, if not enormous, income, and steady work to keep the name on people’s radars.
• UK scene: The Translators Association, as a group within the Society of Authors,
advises but cannot prescribe a minimum rate: “In the SoA’s experience, we have found that UK publishers are prepared to pay in the region of £90 per 1,000 words.” Also advocates for royalties, no copyright rustling, reversion, plus certain other terms, which their lawyers explain when vetting contracts. Majority of UK reviewers, or at least more than previously, will at least
#namethetranslator. Debate among translators themselves is whether recognition/visibility will do anything for remuneration. My view is that these things will be more or less important to different translators at different stages of their careers, and why not fight for both? Realistically I think definitely it’s not enough to go for visibility alone and expect that to have an automatic knock-on effect on rates, though I do think it could have an effect on the amount of work a given translator is able to get.
•
#namethetranslator vs
#translationtalk – useful effect on tone of conversation; widens scope of conversation so its not only translators advocating for ourselves, but writers, reviewers, booksellers, publishers, readers; important of work in translation to a country’s literature and culture, Brexit and cultural exchange, talked about as decades ago in the UK. Make for more interesting and intelligent reviews of our work, but explaining why and offering models for how a reviewer should
#mentionthetranslation; ensure that when translated works do have success, translators are properly compensated, and share in both the recognition and the remuneration; make it more likely for translated works to have success, through promoting translations as important and interesting; encourage translations to take up a larger percentage of the overall market, through sales figures and reader demand, leading to more jobs to go around.
• As publisher at a nonprofit press which focuses on translations, I’m aware that for the most part, publishing the kind of highly literary, idiosyncratic, difficult translations that are the passion projects, the reasons why most of us became literary translations, no one is getting rich. In the majority of cases that cluster towards this end of the scale, the translator makes more money than the author or publisher. Of course this is only right as theirs is by far the most labour-intensive job. I absolutely agree that any publisher that can afford it should pay their translators more. But we should all be aware that these kinds of books are usually not commercially self-sustaining, and therefore it’s a choice the translator has to make, if they’re not lucky enough to have private funds, between balancing translating the work they love for not very much pay, and doing other, better-paid jobs, some of which could be commercial translation, or teaching, or waitressing. And how far they’re willing and able to take the risk of unpaid promotional work. I think it might help if we were all, especially publishers, more open about exactly what money is going where.
• Literary translation is never going to be a well-paid profession until literary translations sell much better than they currently do, in more instances than they currently do. And that’s why I think it’s crucial for us to advocating for translation and translator simultaneously.
