‘Translation is an art’: why translators are battling for recognition

They have often been overlooked in the artistic and literary process, but translators have long claimed they have the power to change everything.

There are tales of myths being born, societies being forged and cities destroyed with just a slip of the pen, such as the supposed translation error that allegedly led to the US deciding to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, or the speculation about life on Mars after the mistranslation of an Italian astronomer.

“[In the literary world] there are entire studies dedicated to tearing apart Constance Garnett’s many translations of Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Tolstoy and Gagol, or Helen Lowe-Porter’s translations of Thomas Mann,” said Richard Mansell, a senior lecturer in translation at Exeter university.

“But there are also plenty of examples where we gain through translation. Would we have the same rich history of the sonnet form in English without the early translations from Petrarch? Or what about the hundreds of expressions in English which stem from the King James Version of the Bible?”

Last week, the work of translators was in the spotlight after the writer Yilin Wang said she did not receive any credit or reimbursement for her translations of the work of Qiu Jin in the British Museum’s China’s Hidden Century exhibition.

The museum has since called it an “unintentional human error”, removed the segments from the exhibition and offered to pay Wang £150 for the time they were displayed.

But for Wang, a translator, poet and editor who lives in Vancouver, the museum’s apology rang hollow. Speaking to the Guardian, she said the removal of her translations felt “retaliatory” and has demanded the British Museum explain its protocol for seeking copyright permissions and outline what had gone wrong.

“It’s really important to respect the labour of translators, who are often erased in publishing and academia,” Wang said. “Publishers neglect to put the name of translators on covers, book reviewers forget to name translators, and now, this happens.

She added: “Translation is an art, and it takes me just as long to translate a poem as it takes for me to write an original one in English. I have to work hard to research the poet, the times they’re living in, and the literary forms they’re working in, then find creative ways to convey the spirit of their work in English. Classic Chinese poetry has many cultural idioms, archaic diction, and completely different grammar and syntactical structures to English.”

This battle for recognition of translators has been raging for a long time, with the Booker-winning translator Jennifer Croft even saying she won’t translate any more books unless her name is on the cover. “Not only is it disrespectful to me, but it is also a disservice to the reader, who should know who chose the words they are going to read,” she said.

The sentiment has grown into a campaign, which led to Pan Macmillan vowing to name the translator on book covers.

“But there’s still a long way to go,” Mansell said. “Of course, translators share many traits with other writers, but there are other skills translators bring to the task, too.”

Shaun Whiteside, the former president of the European Council of Literary Translators Associations , said the incident with the British Museum was “a terrible example of the translator being passed over, or treated as a kind of afterthought”, which was made worse by the removal of Wang’s work from the exhibition.

“As we know, even today translators still often go unmentioned in reviews and even in publishers’ catalogues. Translations don’t just happen on their own, and translators, like any authors, deserve copyright, royalties, and proper credit and remuneration.”

Rebecca DeWald, the co-chair of the Translators Association, said they advocated for translator’s visibility because “you cannot understand what you cannot see”.

“If you don’t know that a book has been translated by a human being, you won’t even begin to think about what thought processes and how much work went into producing the translated text,” she said.

According to DeWald, the debate around AI in translation was emblematic of this misunderstanding. “Languages do not relate to one another in straightforward, one-to-one equivalences, not even the most cognate ones, so they cannot simply be plotted in a table of x in this language equals y in the other.”

Which means the translator always needs to activate their skill in crafting texts the reader wants to read. “It is a different kind of creativity to coming up with the plot for a novel or short story, which involves the imagination of inventing worlds that didn’t exist before. Translation is more closely related to crafting poetry, in that sense, as it is predominantly concerned with language itself.”

Sara Crofts, the chief executive of the Institute of Translation and Interpreting, emphasised that translators played a vital role in building bridges between nations and cultures.

“Yet very often their work is undervalued and invisible. The sign of a good translation is that the reader isn’t aware that it is even a translation, making the translators’ work, by definition, unseen.”