Several months ago I heard a famous literary translator give a talk about the difference between translating and being a translator. The former is the process of taking a text in one language and putting it into another. The latter is everything that comes with doing translation as a profession: building relationships with writers, researching book markets, selling to publishers, promoting books you’ve published, the list goes on. For a new literary translator like me, the message was clear: there’s a lot more to being a translator than you think.

For someone starting out in this field, the outlook is daunting. Translations only make up about three percent of the books published every year in the United States. Even a translation that does relatively well is unlikely to be a big seller in real terms. For a translator, this can make your chosen career appear at once arduous and thankless, both in terms of recognition and, at least as importantly, money.

At the London Book Fair this year, an English-to-French translator described the array of organizations and funds supporting literary translators in France. She claimed this was an illustration of translators being “more respected” in France, with the government making sure translators could actually make their living translating. More.

See: The Mantle

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