The names of the translators of books written in a foreign tongue, and critical acclaim for their work, are rarely seen on the covers or title pages of English editions published in the UK or the USA. I learnt from Jennifer Croft, a translator writing for The Guardian, that although the Man Booker International Award decided in 2016 forthwith to split the £50,000 prize between author and translator, nevertheless, not one of the six winning works of fiction published since then has the translator’s name on the front.
Translation is a highly skilled art. It calls for a deep knowledge of both languages and a sensitive ear for literary style, social context, idiom and narrative mood. Take the first page (in the original) of your favourite foreign-language novel, cut and paste it into Google Translate, and compare what Google suggests with the first page of an accredited English translation. Convinced?
Jennifer Croft translates into English from Polish, Argentine-Spanish, and Ukrainian and is perhaps best known for translating the Polish novelist Olga Tokarczuk's Flights, mixed-genre work for which Croft and Tokarczuk won the above-mentioned prize in 2018. As she says: "Generally speaking we are also the most reliable advocates for our books, and we take better care of them than anybody else. Covers simply can’t continue to conceal who we are. It’s bad business, it doesn’t hold us accountable for our choices, and in its wilful obfuscation it is a practice that is disrespectful not only to us, but to readers as well."
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