On Translation Copyright Rustling

When a translator translates a book, they create a new piece of work in a new language and they then hold copyright to their translation. In the front of the books I've translated there is a note that says something like this:

First published in German as Die Kältezentrale by Inka Parei
(c) Schöffling & Co. Verlagsbuchhandlung GmbH, Frankfurt am Main, 2011
First published in English translation by Seagull Books, 2014
Translation (c) Katy Derbyshire

That means that if someone wants to use my translation for some other purpose – put part of it in an anthology, make a Broadway musical out of it, print it all out in tiny letters on a poster – they have to ask me for permission first. Then I can negotiate an appropriate fee or simply refuse, if I don't want them to use my work. I'm unlikely to refuse but I do want to have some control over what happens to my creative output, understandably.

However, some publishers don't work this way, and retain copyright to translations themselves. This seems to be particularly prevalent among university presses, as Wendell Ricketts has established in a study of US translations. It's well worth reading his report, as he names the good guys and the bad guys in the business, and also goes into some of the strange practices of simply not naming the translator anywhere except in small print in the book itself. He calls on publishers to stop "copyright rustling" in this way, and also on translators to stop putting up with it.

The website No Peanuts! for Translators has launched a petition against the practice. I have signed it because I agree that it is exploitative and wrong, but I feel a little uncomfortable about the way the site is happy to name and shame translators whose copyright gets taken away from them, but doesn't put author's names under its entries. So while you can read their informative and combative piece on copyright rustling, including brusque calls upon the various US translators' associations, you can't identity the "we" who is doing the asking. Perhaps I've missed something on the website, but the only names I find there are 542 "endorsers" who presumably haven't approved each article. And I could take a self-proclaimed "movement" more seriously if it wasn't effectively anonymous.

On Visibility

Something has been niggling away at me from Friday's symposium. One of the panels was on "Translators' Status and Visibility", and was composed of a newspaper book critic, a publishing house editor and a literary translator. And of course the whole room was full of disgruntled translators, who seemed to feel that critics and editors are to blame for translators' lack of status and visibility in Germany. So that made for a rather difficult discussion, I thought. Because yes, as the critic pointed out, there is less and less space for reviews because, as the editor pointed out, fewer and fewer people are reading literature.

So there were a couple of things that irritated me. The first was the assumption in the room that print critics and editors are the only people with any influence over the public's awareness of translators. As I tried to point out but maybe didn't quite manage, there are other people out there, especially on the internet, who are aware of translators' existence and our work. I'm very grateful to the bloggers and online magazine people and tweeters and all those other people on the (Anglophone) internet who help spread the word about our work. There are too many to mention, and I hope the same thing is or will soon be happening in German. And part b of this section of my complaint is that we translators can also do things ourselves to make ourselves more visible, like the Love Your Translator people and Authors and Translators and all the blogging, tweeting, tumblring individual translators out there. Not just that – we can write translator's notes and articles and essays and we can help publicize our books, we can accompany our writers when they read in our countries, and so on. And these things are happening, much more now than ever before, and we are becoming more visible, in Germany and elsewhere, because we're putting ourselves out there, like with the Weltlesebühne and with translation slams and the Bridge Series and other events revolving around just us.

Having said that, I would like to pick holes in a couple of things the panellists said too, seeing as they can't defend themselves. Except maybe in the comments section.

So the critic said, newspapers don't commission reviews of translated books from non-critics, for example Sinologists for Chinese books, because they want critics to be generalists who can build a bridge to the reader. And that means that most reviewers don't feel qualified to comment on translation quality. And I was just sitting there and thinking, well – as the translator on the panel pointed out – online publications don't have spatial limitations, so if I was running a newspaper (let's call it the Utopian Times) I would commission several reviews of the same book (with my unlimited budget): one by a generalist critic, and others by people who know something specific so they can talk about non-general aspects such as translation, plausibility, etc. The same way they get other authors to write fiction reviews, or cardiologists to review non-fiction books about the heart. I might even commission translators to critique translations, if they were very brave. And in fact I don't see any reason why newspaper editors couldn't do exactly the same thing right now, other than "we don't do it that way". Because there are books that get huge long critiques, those event-type books, and why can't you split that half-page review up into two quarter-pages?

But what really got me worked up was what the publishing house editor said about why they don't put translators' names on book covers very often. The reason, she said, was that readers of genre fiction don't care who translated their book. She justified this statement with the example of a German crime writer with a fake French name and biography but obviously no translator's name in the front of the book, because there wasn't a translator. And she said that nobody noticed, ergo: readers don't care. Now first of all, that's a rather speculative assumption, and there was a suggestion from the critic that devoted readers of crime and fantasy actually are interested in their books' translators. But more importantly: even if readers don't care, why should it bother them if you print the translator's name more prominently? You'd make the translators happier, you might even make us take more pride in our work, and you wouldn't bother the readers because they don't care either way, allegedly.

Anyway, that's been preying on my mind for a couple of days and I haven't had any adult company to unload it on since, so here it is. Things are getting better, most publishers and some reviewers are helping translators to become more visible, which can only improve our status, and most importantly we're becoming more confident in ourselves. Hooray for us.

Update: I ought to point out, this fine Monday morning, that the symposium was very good, and in itself evidence that our status as literary translators is on the up. Firstly because the European Commission asked us to hold a whole symposium at their expense, and secondly because it was very well organized and very interesting.

Make Translator Portraits, Not War

The European Council of Literary Translators' Associations, CEATL, has announced its third video competition to raise the profile of literary translators. This year they want portraits of literary translators, which sounds like a fine idea to me. Send them your video by 1 September, when voting starts for one week via a Facebook page.

Schirach and Lust Nominated for LA Times Book Prizes

I know nothing about the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes except that they're awarded on 11 April and come in lots of different categories. Among them are Graphic Novel/Comics and Mystery/Thriller, and two names looked oddly familiar: Ulli Lust for Today Is the Last Day of the Rest of Your Life (trans. Kim Thompson) and Ferdinand von Schirach for The Collini Case (trans. Anthea Bell).

How exciting! An Austrian graphic novelist and a German crime writer, nominated for American book prizes! On the one hand I'm very pleased that the awards don't discriminate between books written in English and books written in other languages, simply singling out good stuff. But then there's the fact that the LA Times website doesn't mention the translators' names, or indeed the fact that the books are translated. And that I had to spend a while searching for Schirach's translator, because neither does the Penguin website. Pretty poor show all round.

Lucas Klein foams at the mouth – justifiably so – about how reviewers need to toughen up and name the translator at Words Without Borders. Awards – and publishers! – need to do the same. The LA Times awards come with a small prize of $500 each, but even that ought to be shared between writer and translator. I've written them a friendly email.

Michelle Woods: Kafka Translated

Franz Kafka is the most commonly listed writer in a study of online dating profiles, followed by Milan Kundera and Paolo Coelho. Kafka has his own adjective and, as Michelle Woods points out in her fascinating Kafka Translated, has even made it into The Wire. You can't get much bigger. And yet Kafka made it big in English via a series of translators. Woods sets out to make those translators a little more visible, and to explore other aspects of translation in and of the writer's work. Her book's tagline is How Translators have Shaped our Reading of Kafka.

She begins with his first translator, into Czech in this case, Milena Jesenská. Many readers know of her through the collection of Kafka's Letters to Milena. I read these letters once, only once, and then tucked them away safely on the shelf because I knew I ought never to read them again. Love letters between a writer and his translator. They can't be un-read and it's an idea a translator would probably do better not to have in her head. Too late. Jesenská's side of the correspondence has been lost, and she remains so invisible to this day that she rarely warrants a surname. Woods tells us how she has been dismissed as a "bad translator" by all sorts of people who don't read Czech, and romanticized by novelists. Her story as Kafka's lover and a victim of the Nazis is inviting but is rarely told with her as an active protagonist. Being a reader of Czech, Woods goes some way to redeeming Jesenská's translations and certainly lends her a voice of her own, as a journalist and translator. She also gives us some fascinating information on the literary climate in which Kafka's Czech translations were first published - a new nation interested in writing experiments and new styles, with much scope for non-domesticating translation.

The next maligned woman in the plot is Willa Muir. Like Jesenská, Muir led a ground-breaking life of her own accord, growing up in poverty in the Shetlands, being one of the first women to attend a British university, moving to Europe and then London and attempting to make a feminist idea of marriage work. What Woods does in her book is provide convincing evidence that Kafka's first translations into English were not done by Edwin Muir and his wife, but by Willa Muir with occasional assistance from her husband. The Muir translations have been subject to a lot of criticism (there's a pattern arising here) for their smoothing-out and domesticating, along with other petty things like their use of allegedly Scottish words. Woods is not naive; she admits that much of this criticism is legitimate – although some of the blame can be placed on Max Brod for his posthumous sanitizing of Kafka through the editing process. What she does here, however, is show that Willa Muir was probably perfectly aware of what she was doing and chose to domesticate because that was what publishers at the time wanted. Sometimes, I'm afraid, they still do. Based on Muir's diaries and an unpublished, thinly disguised autobiographical novel, Woods unearths a fiercely intelligent woman who was translating to feed her family and hated some of the work – notably Feuchtwanger – but loved some of it too, even though it kept her from her own writing. Also, she was very funny indeed.

Woods moves on to living translators, starting with the Irish-born Mark Harman, who pressed Schocken to publish his re-translations of Das Schloß and Amerika because of the drawbacks to the Muir versions. In this section, she focuses partly on the way a translator's own language and reading colour their work. Harman is a Kafka scholar and a great fan of Samuel Beckett, who apparently found Kafka difficult and said that he wrote "like a steamroller". Here, Woods traces the tiny impressions left in Harman's Kafka by Beckett, and looks at the issue of "mid-Atlantic English", something I'm not sure exists. Certainly, it's not a language I can produce, but Harman seems to think he can, having lived in the States for many years. It's in this part that Woods introduces us to an indirect argument between two writer-critics, Milan Kundera and J.M. Coetzee. Both of them have grumpily critiqued Kafka translations, something many writers seem to enjoy doing, as Woods reveals by the by. Coetzee is the baddy, arguing in the case of Harman's The Castle that the translator ought to have tidied things up more towards the end, been less stylistically faithful. When it comes to Michael Hofmann, however, Coetzee finds his Joseph Roth translations not faithful enough. Kundera meanwhile argues that it's important for translators to render not into conventional good French, or English, but to show the author's transgressions against accepted style. To his credit, while this may seem utterly obvious, he did write it in 1996.

The section on Michael Hofmann was the most exciting reading, for me. I have had a problem with Michael Hofmann for a while, presumably founded on envy pure and simple. It's a little late in this review to admit it, but I've only ever read two translations of Kafka, and those were two versions of Ein Landarzt by Michael Hofmann and by Joyce Crick, both built into Will Self's magnificent digital essay "Kafka's Wound". I absolutely adore Hofmann's version. It is playful and stylish and it embellishes very slightly to make up for anything that may have been lost along the way. Whereas Crick's is the translation students ought to read, because it's more accurate and sober. I loved Hofmann's voice as Irmgard Keun in Child of All Nations, and in general I am all too willing to admit that Michael Hofmann is an outstanding translator. I suppose the non-envy part of the problem must be that I don't share his literary taste, with a few exceptions. Michelle Woods contests that his taste is what makes him stand out as a translator, and I found that very interesting. Because he has in fact translated a large swathe of mid-twentieth-century German-speaking men whose work doesn't grab me in the slightest. Which has the major advantage of leaving contemporary writers for the rest of us. I do think there is a kind of translator typecasting at play to some extent, whereby certain translators end up doing historical fiction, some will do classics, one will do racy contemporary novels by young writers, and so on. The subject was discussed by readers at Vishy's Blog last November, and it was interesting to think about how much choice translators have in the matter. Hofmann, at least, speaks of his own "imprimatur" and his wish that people will see his name on a book cover and buy a translation on the strength of that. I think in a small way that already happens.

Woods conducted an interview with Hofmann, which helps matters further by making him seem less pompous than in some of his critical writing. I was most relieved, after about a hundred pages of translation comparisons highlighting euphony and metre and the use of plosives, to find that Hofmann is often motivated by impatience and that he tackles his translations instinctively. Those daring translatorial choices of his that I so much admire are not the result of hours of weighing up and syllable-counting but spur-of-the-moment decisions. So despite being closer to Willa Muir in terms of financial constraints on my work, I now feel I can genuinely aspire to translate as playfully as Hofmann, when the occasion allows. Where he details his working philosophy in the interview, I find myself nodding:

Everything I do is on a case-by-case basis. The degree to which a book is left in German or all goes into English – I call it the schapps or wurst (or brandy or sausage) question. Whereabouts on the Anglo-American continuum it goes.

And elsewhere, he wrote something I find equally inspiring and close to my own emerging understanding of translation as a utopian project. Woods quotes him as describing translation as "a mode of reading so sympathetic and transitive that the outcome is a wholly new work, it's hunch and nerve and (my own muse) impatience. It's approaching the avowed-impossible, and shrugging your shoulders and just getting on with it." Yes.

There is much more in Kafka Translated but the second half focuses on Kafka's reception, which is of less specific interest here – although well worth reading. For me, the first half is an inspiring read for all those interested in translation. Woods is inherently sympathetic to the translator as a creative individual and has done us all a good turn by shining a light on four of the people who have indeed shaped our reading. She argues that what critics often launch upon as "mistakes" are almost always conscious decisions and should be respected as such. I devoured the book in one day and would wholly recommend it to general readers as well as translators, if only it weren't so expensive. for those interested in exploring translation decisions for themselves, Susan Bernofsky's exciting-looking new The Metamorphosis is more affordable.

Yoko Tawada/Chantal Wright: Portrait of a Tongue

I want translations with copious footnotes, footnotes reaching up like skyscrapers to the top of this or that page so as to leave only the gleam of one textual line between commentary and eternity.

This is the Nabokov quote (from "Problems of Translation: Onegin in English") with which Chantal Wright prefaces her introductory chapter on translating Yoko Tawada's Portrait of a Tongue. Her book is billed as an "experimental translation" and yes, that's what it is. She has divided the pages into two and given us both a translation in the left-hand column and a wealth of annotations on the right, a "translation-with-commentary". There are different types of comments: firstly, what Wright calls "linguistic facilitating" – i.e. explaining what words and issues that crop up might mean in an objective way – then giving citations from other texts (or films, or cultural artefacts) referenced or perhaps referenced or not at all directly referenced in the translation, and thirdly, personal anecdotes. Wright tells us:

Despite the inclusion of this personal response, the translation was never intended to be an exercise in narcissm. Rather, it aims to be a protocol of how a translator encounters a text.

The story itself is a complicated musing on language and culture and customs, narrated by a rather opaque character who is neither German nor American but speaks German and is visiting America. There she meets P, or invents P, a German woman living in America. And she tells us all sorts of things about P – how she behaves in the shower at the swimming pool, the way she phrases certain things, words she teaches the narrator (sometimes forgotten in the meantime, sometimes only alluded to), stories she tells. There's a great deal of comparison of the two languages, something German readers can deal with because they tend to read English well, whereas English readers need more help. As such, it's the ideal text for Wright's exciting project. It's the kind of writing people think of when they use the word "untranslatable", I suspect. And Wright goes right ahead and totally owns it.

Because of course it's an exercise in visible translation. As we read the text on the left, the layout guides us smoothly on to the translator's thoughts on the right, after every few sentences. There is plenty of space on the pages, with paragraph breaks marked separately. It really does feel like you're inside the translator's head as she explains her reading of Yoko Tawada.

Here's one example I find particularly pertinent. I will attempt to explain it afterwards, from my point of view, because I'd like to play Wright's game here just for the fun of it:

P showed me the famous Widener Library. 
We met a friend of P’s there, an American.           

[einen Bekannten]  There is a clear difference between Bekannte(r) [acquaintance] and Freund(in) [friend] in German that is difficult to uphold in English. The English word “acquaintance” is rarely used these days, whereas Bekannte(r) is used a great deal in German. The English word “friend" can express a variety of degrees of acquaintance, perhaps therefore doing away with the need for other terms. K, a German acquaintance of mine, once introduced his mistress at a party as “meine Bekannte". All parties at the party were party to the deceit.

(I'm afraid I can't reproduce the layout here.)

The reason this is pertinent is that Chantal Wright is a friend of mine. In blogging language we call what I am doing here a full disclosure. I have saved it up for this point for various reasons, including to encourage readers to take this review more seriously than they might have done, had they known about our connection from the beginning.

I met Chantal when she was living in Berlin and I can't remember how, but I think it was about ten years ago. We have been in sporadic contact since then. If I had to describe our relationship in German, I'm not sure which word I would choose. She feels more than a Bekannte and not quite a Freundin. Perhaps I would call her a befreundete Kollegin - a colleague I am friends with. Because of interference from English, I am quicker than many Germans to call people Freunde. Sometimes this makes me expect more of people than they are willing to give.

Later in Tawada's text, the author herself comes back to the subject of words for friends in English and German. She writes:

But in German there is no neue Freundin – at least not for adults – unless it involves a relationship that is both sexual and serious. So if a friend is new, you can't yet know if she really is a friend. That's why there are only old friends in Germany.

Do you see how it all interweaves and reflects back and each side adds something to the other? You may be aware of another, more famous annotated translation making waves at the moment. I've read Jonathan Franzen's The Kraus Project and reviewed it for another publication, which isn't out yet. And although he never mentions Nabokov, Franzen seems to have taken his remark about towering footnotes to heart. The problem is, though, that Franzen's footnotes distract from the translated text. Partly due to the conservative format, the multiple-page anecdotes and explanations accompanying Kraus's essays interrupt the flow to such an extent that they sometimes make them harder to understand rather than elucidating, as I think Nabokov intended. Yes, they call attention to Franzen as the translator – but that high-viz jacket is not terribly advantageous to the reading of Karl Kraus (although the reading experience as a whole is still interesting). To labour that metaphor a little more, Franzen becomes a railway worker standing by the tracks, his bright yellow outfit distracting the train driver from the signals coming up. Does that make sense? I hope so.

Chantal, in contrast, helps the driver (that makes the reader the train driver and the story the train itself, right?) by climbing into the cab and pointing out sights along the way, other trains up ahead, level crossings to slow down for, and so on. Portrait of a Tongue is a rare thing, a genuinely readable exercise in putting translation theory into practice. If you are interested in translation or languages, I urge you to read it.  

Two Winning Videos

The European Council of Literary Translators' Associations (CEATL) is not the world's sexiest organisation, but they have now chosen two very sexy videos as winners of their "Spot the Translator" contest. If you haven't been sent at least one of the links over the past month or so, you obviously aren't a translator. The aim of the game is to raise awareness for literary translators' work.

Nathaniel Popkin on Authors & Translators

At The Smart Set, Nathaniel Popkin writes about the motivation behind the Authors & Translators website, a runaway success:

Good translation is thus a rather magical sleight of hand. The translator has to force herself through genius and instinct to become invisible, a dangerous proposition in a media world that rewards those, most of all, who shout and strut.

On International Author-Translator Relations

My friend and fellow translator Cristina Vezzaro has a shiny new blog, called authors-translators.blogspot.it. She was rather tired of translators rarely being acknowledged in reviews and so on, and so she devised a questionnaire to put to authors. It turns out that some writers are all too happy to talk about their work with translators.

The blog seems to be in several different languages. If you'd like to submit an author interview, go to the blog for a contact address. And here are the questions in English:

Have any of your books been translated? If so, into which languages?

Have you had an opportunity to meet your translator personally or make contact with him or her?
 
How did the meeting or the contact go?

Is it difficult for you to entrust your literary work to a translator, or do you trust them blindly?

Have you ever heard someone reading extracts from your books in another language? What was your reaction?
 
Do you feel you can assess the quality of a translation?
 
What languages would you most like to see your books translated into, and why?
 
What's the first thing that occurs to you when you think of the profession of literary translator?

Go ahead! Jump on the authors-translators bandwagon! It's a bit of a win-win situation all round actually, with free publicity for writers and translators. What an excellent idea.

Time for a Rant: Actors v. Translators

I forgot to say at this interview that a blog is a wonderful platform for a nice private rant. And here's one that's been brewing for a while, after we talked about it at our recent workshop: when publishers or event organisers fly a writer in for readings (mostly to Germany) and then put her on stage with an actor to read the translation - often even in the actual city where the translator lives.

I've heard similar anecdotes a number of times, and even accompanied translators to events where they sat unacknowledged in the audience while an actor read the words they wrote. Let me tell you, that's pretty humiliating. It seems that people aren't picking up on the idea of simply asking the translator whether she'd like to do that job, at least if she's going to be there anyway. Is it a communications breakdown?

My German translator friends tell me they sometimes get an email from an editor they work with saying, Hey, guess what, your author's going to be in town on Tuesday! Would you like to come along? Worse still: Hey, guess what, your author was in town last Tuesday! Why didn't you come along? Whereas what ought to be happening, in an ideal world, is that the editor informs the translator the minute they know the writer is coming over, and asks her whether she'd like to read from her translation.

German publishing houses will often have people who take care of events specifically, because readings are very important for the literary landscape here. And I'm guessing that these people may sometimes be the loose connection where things are going wrong. I don't know enough about how these things work so I'm moving on thin ice here, but my next guess is that if someone other than the publisher organises an event with a translated writer, which is very often the case, they won't have the information about the translator. And that's where I think the publisher's events people could easily step in and say, Ah, my file here says the writer's translator lives in your city! I'll send you her contact details so you can ask if she'd like to read.

Or, as a friend pointed out, authors will often have had some contact with their translator in advance. They could possibly get in touch too and ask that all-important question.

Of course not everyone's going to say yes. Some people would rather not read in front of an audience, which is fine. Or they might hate the writer's guts, in which case they probably wouldn't want to share the same space. But in many cases, a translator of a specific text has specific insights and can read that text better than an actor could. A case in point is Ingo Herzke, a Hamburg-based translator who holds readings with his writer A.L. Kennedy. In fact - as if by magic, the perfect best-practice example - he's chairing an event with her at the LCB next Thursday. And need I mention Hamburg's most famous translator, beardo extraordinaire Harry Rowohlt? A man who makes a living out of reading his translations better than anyone else possibly could? The German translators' association offers regular events helping people to train for readings. Event organisers - think of all you're missing out on!

In the other direction, i.e. when translated writers get invited to the UK, I've had some very positive experiences of being put on the podium, not only to interpret and read but also to share a couple of insights. I try not to hog the limelight too much. But of course translated literature has a very different status there than it does in Germany, where it's much less exotic.

I shall be reading in Berlin soon. I just thought I'd mention that. I was delighted to be asked.

Update: Please read the comments section for a detailed description of the event organiser's view!

Translators: Promote!

At Translationista, Susan Bernofsky writes about a panel at the American literary translators' recent convention on "The Translator's Toolkit", something that the PEN Translation Committee there is currently working on. In the past, they have issued guidelines for reviewers on how to approach translations, but they're adjusting that position now. I'll be interested to find out exactly what comes out of the process. Bernofsky writes:

The "Translators Toolkit" will wind up containing suggestions for supplementary information about a book that can be distributed to potential reviewers along with the usual publicity materials a publisher tucks inside review copies before sending them out. The exact recommendations are still a work in progress, but I expect to see a list of suggestions including items like this: a description of the book's stylistic peculiarities in the original and how the translator sought to address them, status of the author in her original-language context, any particular anecdotes of interest surrounding the translation, etc. These are things likely to interest both reviewers and readers of reviews.

At the panel, a few publishing people also talked about getting translators actively involved in promoting their books. Which is something we talked about in Germany a couple of years ago, as I wrote here. There was some scepticism from some quarters, and in fact some of the experts' suggestions at the Rochester conference go a little further than even I would venture. Jeffrey Lependorf, for example, "encourages translators to record brief (3 mins or under) videos about the book to be added to a book's page on the publisher's website." OK, I would do that, in fact I have done it in the past, but the whole thing was organised by the wonderful German Book Office so I didn't have to find someone with a camera and/or someone to do the editing, put it online, etc. I'd hope that publishers would give translators a great deal of support for these kinds of activities, which are almost certainly going to be unpaid.

Anyway, do read about it at first hand.

Ending Translator Invisibility

The school holidays are eating my brain. There are so many things I ought to be blogging about!

First of all, the winners of CEATL's Spot the Translator video contest are here! Hurrah! An end to translator invisibility!

Secondly, 90% of almost 2000 respondents to a survey in German trade mag Börsenblatt said translators ought to be named on book covers! This may have something to do with there not being a lobby in favour of translator invisibility. The lovely Isabel Bogdan wrote a guest column in the mag about one reason why translators tend to be invisible - because our names are so rarely on book covers. Perhaps things will change in that respect in Germany, as they have for the most part in the USA. Oddly, British publishers are quite stubborn about these things - but on the other hand, they pay better.

Saints and Ninjas

Daniel Hahn and the people from the British Centre for Literary Translation are challenging the notion that nobody's interested in translation. Not just in a shouty way, but in practice too. At the English PEN website, Danny writes about a series of events they held at the recent Edinburgh Book Festival.

This series (...) isn’t just about shoving the translator onto a stage to sit next to their writer, a well-meant gesture but which is mostly about helping the original writer get by in English; rather it’s made up of events about literary translation. Typically, of course, a translator expects to be invisible (that is apparently the most desirable state of affairs) – certainly nobody’s heard of us in the way they might have heard of our authors; and English-speaking audiences, we’re always told, aren’t on the whole interested in, or perhaps just aren’t comfortable with, discussions of the subject. So if we were to programme a series of events about translation, featuring in most cases a line-up of translators nobody’s ever heard of, would anyone show up to hear what we had to say? We put it to the test.

They sold out, he tells us. I want everybody to take note of this - and when you organise your next literary festival, I want you to schedule translator events too. I want us to be on those stages in our own right, as simperingly modest and unattractive as we may be. Hell, if Franzen can lecture about bird-watching, we can thrill audiences with talk of our work. You won't regret it.

More on Self-Translation

...as defined previously, as in publishers having their own books translated into English and then putting them on the eBook market from afar...

Cologne-based publishers Lübbe have started doing just that with a serialized "webnovel" called Apocalypsis, written by Mario Giordano. You can download installments in English via Amazon or iTunes. Unfortunately I don't have the right device, which meant I had to ask someone to do me a favour. The reason being that I was interested in who translated it but the translator's name isn't given on either of those two pages, nor in any of the publicity material I found. That's unusual - most German translation contracts stipulate that the translator must be named in publicity material.

But she is named in the eBook itself: Diana Beate Hellmann, Los Angeles. She's an experienced translator, albeit in the other direction. But they also name the English editor so I assume the translation is of decent quality. Aside from the translator invisibility issue, if you're going to do the job yourself then this is the way to do it.

According to this PR text, the book "contains a  captivating  cap·ti·vate
tr.v. cap·ti·vat·ed, cap·ti·vat·ing, cap·ti·vates
1. To attract and hold by charm, beauty, or excellence. See Synonyms at charm.

2. Archaic To capture.
..... Click the link for more inforblend of text, illustrations, video, audio, and interactive enhanced elements". Apparently, "what starts out as a sophisticated Vatican conspiracy, soon develops into a uniquely intense and spectacular thriller. Pope John Paul III has disappeared without a trace. The whole world is searching for him, including journalist Peter Adam. What he finds out exceeds the bounds of human imagination: evidence that the church is on the brink of doom and so is the world…."

Oh my. It's certainly an interesting experiment, and was launched with a bit of a bang at Hay Festival on 8 June, although not so much of a bang that I noticed it over here. And I love the way the protagonist has a totally international name - he could be German or Australian or Dutch or South African, for all we know so far.

Amazon.com puts episode 1 at "#107,624 Paid in Kindle Store", compared to "#1.054 Bezahlt in Kindle-Shop" for the same episode in German on Amazon.de. It's a bit too early to pass judgement, admittedly, but perhaps that demand issue I raised previously might be coming into play... But then of course I have to say that to prove my pessimistic point. I certainly wish them the best of success!

Spot the Translator Contest

CEATL is an umbrella group for European literary translators' associations, now covering 26 countries. I didn't even know there were 26 countries in Europe!

And now they're fighting back on the familiar translator invisibility front. People sometimes tend to forget that translators exist, which isn't helped by publishers who don't credit us prominently or reviews that don't have space to name us. I have a special tag devoted to translator invisibility because it's a subject dear to my heart. I just counted and it now encompasses 19 entries. But how to raise the profile of literary translators? CEATL has had an exciting idea.

They're holding a contest for video artists, which you can read about on their Facebook event page. I quote: CEATL is

calling for video artists to create sparky and clever short films reflecting the existence and importance of literary translators, their challenges, and their role in literature. Videos up to three minutes long are accepted, and a prize of 1000 Euros will be awarded for the winner on the International Translation Day, the 30th of September 2012.

Make films! Discover how much the camera loves translators! Join the competition! Win lots and lots of money! Make the world a better place! You know you want to.

Gili Bar-Hillel and the 800lb Gorilla

Five out of ten times when I tell people I translate literature, they ask me: "Oh, did you translate Harry Potter? I bet you're really rich."

No. I didn't translate Harry Potter. I translate from German to English. Joanne Rowling writes in English and is translated into other languages. Her translator into German is Klaus Fritz. No, I don't know him. No, I have no idea how much he got paid. No, you probably haven't heard of any of the books I've translated.

Rowling's Hebrew translator is Gili Bar-Hillel. She writes a blog in Hebrew that I'd never heard of and can't read. But she's written a post in English that you ought to look at. In it, she details her humiliating treatment by Warner Bros. since they started making films of the Harry Potter series. She's been forced to sign away her intellectual rights to all the terms she coined in her translations, is not credited in the Hebrew versions of the films - and wasn't even given a complimentary ticket to see them. This seems to be contrary to common practice in Israel and it also seems to have been the same for all Rowling's translators.

It's a shameful tale. As Bar-Hillel points out, the small figures Warner Bros. might have had to pay to the translators to use their intellectual property have probably been outweighed by all the lawyers' fees to keep them out of it. Her blog is the only recourse she has to express her anger and humiliation against the Hollywood behemoth. I don't know if she'll read this post – just as Bar-Hillel doesn't know if Joanne Rowling will read hers – but if she does: my heart goes out to you, Gili, and I hope you receive some more tangible support and get what ought to be yours. Well done for taking a stand!

Where Is The D'oh! Button?

Admirably, The Guardian has published a translation of Günter Grass' poem in memory of his editor, the translator Helmut Frielinghaus. Unfortunately, they have failed to credit the translator.

Update: The print edition does actually credit the translator - it is the hugely talented Breon Mitchell.

Wolfenbüttel Manifesto - 10 Theses on Blogging for Translators

This is an initial outcome of the workshop on blogging for translators I held in Wolfenbüttel last weekend. You can read the original German at Die Übersetzer. Comments are welcome, preferably over there.

1. Translators are experts. We often know the works we translate almost as well as the writers do, and usually better than their editors. We know the countries whose literatures we translate, and we know the respective literatures themselves. Not least, we have a firm command of our own languages and we play a role in their development, consciously or unconsciously, intentionally or not.

2. Yet translators are often invisible. In reviews, on book covers, in advertising material – often enough, our work and our mere existence are denied. Like vampires, we do not appear in the mirror held up to the public, are seen at times as literary parasites with no life-giving ideas of our own. You can tell a good translation if you don’t notice it’s translated, they say. Whether this old maxim still holds true or not, it doesn’t mean that we translators have to remain invisible.

3. The internet provides a wealth of opportunities for expressing ourselves to a theoretically unlimited audience.

4. A blog is one of these possibilities. With a minimum of technical input, it can be used to spread our ideas, bringing ourselves, our projects and possibly our entire profession out into the public eye.

5. Reader comments and networking with other bloggers enable a dialogue that would otherwise not take place at all.

6. Bearing in mind that the readership is theoretically unlimited – and thanks to online translation services no longer even restricted by language – a translation blog ought to be as readable as possible. In cases where we want to present our work to the uninitiated, we don’t want to scare off this readership.

7. On the other hand, a blog also enables a more intensive dialogue with other translators, possibly from around the world. We need a space for writing about specific professional and translation issues, where we can discuss our work and the way we see ourselves.

8. In the German-speaking world, there are very few links between translation theorists and practitioners. A blog could be an attempt to connect the ivory tower with the ground crew, provided discussion takes place in a generally readable form. It could also involve students of literary translation, who often reflect their own work more than established translators.

9. A blog should be fun to read. As translators, we have the rhetorical tools at our fingertips for writing well. We ought to use them. It can be incredibly liberating to put your own words down on an empty blog page rather than interpreting others’ as usual. Writing freely also has advantages for our translation work, even if it’s something as banal as helping us to find new formulations.

10. All too often, translators are reticent people who shy away from the limelight. For some time though, especially in Germany, we have been raising our voices through readings we organise ourselves, the PR work of the professional organisations, letters to newspapers, etc. Let’s take another step out of the shadow of our writers and create our own platform.

On Reviewing Translations

The ever-excellent Words Without Borders is running a series of thoughtful pieces on how to review translations. So far we've had Daniel Hahn and Tess Lewis, both of whom translate and write reviews and so have a unique insight - but take very different stances. And also some basic guidelines from Susan Bernofsky, Jonathon Cohen and Edith Grossman. These are not dissimilar to the PEN American Center's reviewers guidelines for translated books.

As I've mentioned before, the German literary translators' association VdÜ has been organising events where critics, editors and translators get together to discuss the matter. The reactions in the press were mixed, with one critic in particular getting very defensive. As some of the WWB pieces show, translators often see the matter differently to reviewers - and aren't as aware of the constraints on critics as we perhaps should be. But as I see it, a review should at the very least mention the fact that a book has been translated, and from which language, and by whom. Daniel Hahn points out that translators hold copyright to the translated text, and for that reason alone we deserve mentioning in a review.

I'm no great friend of the "one-adjective acknowledgement" - in German that adjective is "kongenial" (perfectly matched) and in English "smooth". Or occasionally "mellifluous", which means much the same thing but sounds better. Funny that the Germans are so much more effusive in this respect, but perhaps that reflects their generally greater understanding of foreign languages. Yet despite this personal allergy on my part, I still prefer this perfunctory approach to the common tactic of ignoring the translator entirely.

The books I've translated so far haven't got a huge amount of review coverage. But here's one piece in which I'm not mentioned. And you know what? I'm with Daniel Hahn here - it doesn't bother me incredibly in this case. The book in question is not a literary title and the writing itself isn't what stands out about it. So there's no need to go into how well I did my job. Nevertheless, I would expect to have been acknowledged in the bibliographic details at the bottom. My dream review? Go here - where Charlotte Ryland does absolutely everything right, including tickling my ego.

I'd like to hope this discussion will take the fear out of reviewing translations for some critics and arts editors - and that in turn prompts more reviews in the English-speaking press.

Guardian Goes German. Observer Doesn't

Honestly, you go off hobnobbing with translators, writers and critics for one day and miss the German books event of the year in the English-language press.

Go to the Guardian now for a survey of German books to read (lots of dead white men), a look at the dire German bestseller charts (depressing but interesting for the comparisons to Britain) and an interview with the charming German writer Thomas Pletzinger, who does his best to dispel the myth that there is such a thing as German writing.

Plus there's a review in Sunday's Observer of Johanna Adorján's An Exclusive Love. The piece is short, admittedly, but neglects to mention the fact that the book was translated at all, and therefore also the fact that it was translated by Anthea Bell. Letting the side down rather - as usual - those Observer people. Perhaps they should take a leaf out of the Huffington Post's book - where Nina Sankovich tells us she's been shamed: "I will go back through all my hundreds of reviews of the past three-plus years and make sure that the translators of each foreign tome are acknowledged for their hard -- and largely hidden -- work."