Jokha Alharthi’s fascinating novel Celestial Bodies, translated by Marilyn Booth and published by Sandstone Press, won the International Man Booker prize a couple of evenings ago. This was particularly exciting because Marilyn is (or technically was) a member of our book group. She joined us in March to discuss the translation and give us some insight into the setting, the history of Oman and the plot.
What is so encouraging about their joint achievement is that it highlights how women authors are being translated – five of the six-book shortlist were written by women authors, and all were translated by women. Women in translation are still underrepresented but this year’s shortlist certainly went some way to highlighting change.
Another major translation prize which specifically addresses this problem is awarded by Warwick University:
The Warwick Prize for Women in Translation
What is exciting about the Warwick Prize is that it has a broader remit than the Man Booker in terms of eligibility criteria: the Warwick Prize extends to poetry, literary non-fiction, work of fiction for children or young adults, graphic novel, or play text – provided that the works are written by a woman, translated into English by a translator (or translators) of any gender, and published by a UK or Irish publisher.
The deadline for this year’s prize entries is 7 June 2019, and the prize will be awarded in November.
So, if you have an eligible title, get your skates on!
Publishing Scotland held their annual conference last week and the Society of Authors were invited to give a short presentation. Given that I’m on the Scottish committee of the Society of Authors (SOAiS), Caroline Dunford and I went along. It was a great idea to involve us, although we did feel a little like the rabbits turning up at the foxes’ tea party! My best quote of the day is thanks to the Society of Authors (SOA):
“Authors remain the only essential part of the creation of a book and it is in everyone’s interests to ensure they can make a living.”
My second best quote was mine (modesty apart) – and it featured a bit on Twitter too (thanks to Alice Fischer and others!)
For translators, like authors, their name is their brand.
I’ve included some excerpts from my part of our joint presentation below, but first I must acknowledge my debt to the SOA and to Sarah Macintyre whose blog was a great inspiration for the part on illustrators and the hashtag campaign #picturesmeanbusiness
Seven Ways to work better with authors and translators (and sell more books)
Between us Caroline and I have come up with seven ways that we think publishers can work better with authors (and translators) and sell more books. So I’m starting off with the first four.
I’m going to jump in at the deep end and talk about contracts, and for obvious reasons much of what I’d like to focus on is related to translators. In that sense, the contract is well down the path towards publication. A lot could be said about the many stages that precede it: the sleuthing work of finding suitable books to translate, reading them and preparing reports, gauging the feasibility of the project, the possibility of sourcing funds, and of course the key part, actually choosing a translator.
However, let’s leave all of that aside and go straight to the point. Contracts between publishers and translators have often been extremely one-sided in the past, that is the onus is entirely on the translator: mostly stick and precious little carrot.
The Society of Authors supports a vision of authors’ rights, centred on the author, and it campaigns to ensure that the implementation of that vision is not undermined by a concept of copyright which instead is centred on the investor.
The argument is that an investor-centred system of rights maximises the benefits for a minimum number of holders, whereas in an author-centred system of rights these benefits are more equably divided.
So, in the case of the translator, what rights are we talking about?
The moral rights are (or should be) unwaivable but they must first be asserted. With particular regard to translators, all translated books should contain that phrase in the copyright section.
However, more importantly, a translation is an original work, and given that it involves considerable creative effort translations are eligible for copyright – and have been since the nineteenth century Berne Convention (1886). Sadly, it is all too frequently taken for granted that the publisher will hold the copyright for an English translation, but things are changing. The reading public are growing more aware of copyright issues and readers have been known to check the copyright page.
Best practice would seem straightforward in this regard: Your translator should assert his or her moral rights, and should automatically retain copyright. Then, in a separate clause in the contract, she or he will license it back to the publisher subject to a straightforward negotiation regarding a reasonable percentage to be paid for subsequent exploitation of the work.
This is the more equitable vision of shared rights that the Society encourages. It also allows the translator and other copyright holders to benefit from the ongoing success of a publication – which sadly is not always the case.
Big as we all know does not always mean beautiful – let alone equitable. The largest publisher of fiction in translation is now Amazoncrossing. You might pull a face, but Amazon’s investment in this sector has been game-changing. Moreover, Amazon has also shown that it can mend its ways in one important respect: copyright.
The author I’ve used here as an example is Oliver Pötzch, whose book The Hangman’s Daughter was translated by Lee Chadeayne. Pötzch became the first translated Amazon Publishing author to sell over 1 million copies. In that book, published in 2010 Amazon acknowledged the translator’s moral rights on the copyright page but retained the copyright to the English translation – meaning that Chadeayne largely missed out on the book’s success. However, for Pötzch’s subsequent books, the Dark Monk series, Chadeayne has retained copyright – a lesson well learned, for the translator, but notably also for Amazoncrossing.
It is worth adding that many of the smaller, independent publishers have always set high standards in this respect, but I won’t name any more names!
Which brings me to where it is important to name names: This is closely linked to the first point on rights. The moral rights clause of a contract states that “X shall be recognised as the translator of this work”: this means what it says: The translator must be acknowledged as the translator everywhere, in publicity, in catalogues, and most basically on the book itself.
Almost without exception translations into English are now acknowledged on an inside front cover.
But on the outside front cover the story is rather different.
The situation has improved in recent years, but somewhere around 40% of books do not have the translator’s name on the front cover. Yet reader surveys show an overwhelming majority (up to 90%) of respondents who think that translators ought to be visible on the cover. As was mentioned in the case of copyright issues, readers’ opinions are a powerful motivator for change in this respect.
There is one more aspect about accreditation that needs to be touched on: it’s that dreaded word. Metadata. It’s linked to two important Twitter campaigns: #namethetranslator and #picturesmeanbusiness promoted by the Society of Authors.
Translators – and illustrators – have been wondering why their names don’t show up with their books on Amazon, why reviews often list only the writers, and why radio programmes sometimes don’t credit the translator while discussing the English book! It often comes down to one basic thing… faulty or incomplete book data.
This affects translators’ careers in their loss of valuable name-brand recognition – for translators, like authors, their name is their brand. But it means publishers lose out, too. You lose what is becoming one of the most valuable things in book publicity – which hopefully will translate into book sales –, and that’s discoverability.
Discoverability of the book, of the publisher, but also of the translator. My name was left off a book review in the Wall Street Journal a year ago, and although I did manage to contact the reviewer and editor afterwards, the opportunity had been missed. Who knows what might have happened if my name had been there, and if a reader happened to have been looking for a translator… that is the way future opportunities are made and lost.
The Society of Authors is working hard to change this. Nicola Solomon, Chief Executive, often ends a talk on this particular subject saying, “If there’s one thing you go away and do after this, make sure it’s improving your book data.”
So, making sure you improve your book data and the discoverability of your books will also give you massive kudos with your translators and illustrators. We are, as the phrase goes, all in this together. And one last point about discoverability: if you publish translated works please credit the translators on your own website – you’d be amazed, but some publishers don’t!
My last point is on fair remuneration. This letter written by the SOA a year ago makes the point clearly.
Earnings are falling fast, yet – as was said earlier – it is in everyone’s interests to ensure that creators and writers, in the broadest sense of the term, can make a living.
The key solution lies in protecting and equitably sharing those rights we’ve been talking about, and copyright in particular.
Let me briefly mention a piece of European legislation, the European Commission’s proposed directive to modernize the European Copyright framework, referred to as the Digital Single Market directive. Irrelevant you might think, but the SOA urges the government to continue to reflect European legislation in order to provide stability for the industry.
On the specific point of fair remuneration the draft legislation (Chapter 3) addresses the findings of that survey I just mentioned. Creators of all stripes were championed by the President of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker (again September 2016) (scroll down – about halfway through his speech)
Artists and creators are our crown jewels. The creation of content is not a hobby. It is a profession. And it is part of our European culture. I want journalists, publishers and authors to be paid fairly for their work, whether it is made in studios or living rooms, whether it is disseminated offline or online.
It’s that time of year (again) and The Washington Post has published its “Notable Fiction of 2013” list (here). A tweet from Arcadia highlighted the fact that Miklos Bánffy’s Transylvanian Trilogy is on the list, quite a feat for a book whose first volume was published, in Hungarian, in 1934. What is really heartening is that the English version was published by Arcadia, a leading independent publisher of translated fiction. Moreover, the translation was by the author’s daughter Katalin Bánffy-Jelen and Patrick Thursfield, appearing under the title The Writing on the Wall in 1999, 2000 and 2001.
Thursfield met the author’s daughter in the 1990s and together they worked on the translation for several years. Certainly a labour of love and dedication given that the three volumes total some 1,500 pages. Their translation of the last volume, They Were Divided, won the prestigious Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize in 2002 and the translators received their award in Oxford from Umberto Eco. This is the beautiful cover of that edition.
On the website of the Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize I found these memorable and rousing words: ‘Common European thought is the fruit of the immense toil of translators. Without translators, Europe would not exist; translators are more important than members of the European Parliament.’ (Milan Kundera)
For good measure, here’s my review of that prize-winning translation. It appeared in Solander in 2007.
Miklós Bánffy, They Were Divided, trans. by Patrick Thursfield and Katalin Bánffy-Jelen, Arcadia Books, 2007 (original text 1940), £12.99, pb, 326pp, 1900850516
The lost world evoked by this classic novel is an epic tale of love and bittersweet nostalgia, washed down with a liberal draught of derring-do. The setting is Transylvania and Hungary in the decade leading up to the outbreak of the First World War, when a seemingly inexorable course of events culminated in the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the collapse of this once great country.
Bánffy’s Transylvanian Trilogy, of which They Were Divided forms the third part (not having read the others was certainly not a drawback), was published just before the Second World War. In his foreword to this reprinted edition, Patrick Leigh Fermor describes the aristocracy as “throwing away their spectacles and fixing in monocles”. Indeed, they were so pre-occupied with the endless round of parties, shoots, love affairs, gossip and Anglophilia, that they totally failed to notice the “writing on the wall”.
The personalities of Balint Abady, his fatally flawed cousin, László Gyeroffy, provide an extraordinary insight into a society that disappeared without trace, as well as portraying human nature in all its frailty and complexity. In this, inevitable parallels can be drawn with Lampedusa’s The Leopard. I was fascinated by the descriptions of Denestornya, the Abady residence, and of his mother, the Countess Roza. Definitely a European classic in a prize-winning translation. [Lucinda Byatt]
Addendum:
Minutes after finishing writing this post, I discovered that Patrick Thursfield died in August 2003, so this revival of interest in this brilliant translation is also a fitting tribute, keeping his work alive. Much more about Thursfield and about the translated trilogy can be found in this wonderful blog post by Neglected Books.
I’m going to jump in at the deep end and talk about contracts, and for obvious reasons much of what I’d like to focus on is related to translators. In that sense, the contract is well down the path towards publication. A lot could be said about the many stages that precede it: the sleuthing work of finding suitable books to translate, reading them and preparing reports, gauging the feasibility of the project, the possibility of sourcing funds, and of course the key part, actually choosing a translator.
The author I’ve used here as an example is Oliver Pötzch, whose book The Hangman’s Daughter was translated by Lee Chadeayne. Pötzch became the first translated Amazon Publishing author to sell over 1 million copies. In that book, published in 2010 Amazon acknowledged the translator’s moral rights on the copyright page but retained the copyright to the English translation – meaning that Chadeayne largely missed out on the book’s success. However, for Pötzch’s subsequent books, the Dark Monk series, Chadeayne has retained copyright – a lesson well learned, for the translator, but notably also for Amazoncrossing.
Translators – and illustrators – have been wondering why their names don’t show up with their books on Amazon, why reviews often list only the writers, and why radio programmes sometimes don’t credit the translator while discussing the English book! It often comes down to one basic thing… faulty or incomplete book data.
Discoverability of the book, of the publisher, but also of the translator. My name was left off a book review in the 
A World of Words-Lucinda Byatt 