Translators Should Sign the Cover

Pick up a translated novel in any bookshop and look at the cover. You will find the author's name, usually large. You will find the title. You may find a quotation from a newspaper, a sticker announcing a prize, the name of the publisher. You will very rarely find the name of the person who wrote every single word you are about to read.

I have translated eleven books from Polish into German over the last ten years. On three of them, my name appears on the cover. On the other eight, it is on the title page, in small type, beneath the words translated by, as if it were a note about the paper stock. I do not think this is a matter of vanity. I think it is a matter of accuracy.

Consider what a translator actually does. We do not replace one word with another, like a machine converting currencies. We read a sentence in one language, understand it as fully as we can, and then write a new sentence in another language that does, as closely as possible, the same work. We choose every word. We decide the rhythm, the register, the length of every sentence, where the commas go, which jokes survive and which have to be rebuilt from nothing. When a reader of the German edition admires a paragraph, they are admiring a paragraph I wrote.

That is not a claim to have written the book. The author wrote the book. The characters, the story, the ideas, the structure, the thing that made a publisher want to buy it in the first place, all of that is theirs. But the text, the actual sequence of words on the page, is a collaboration, and one of the collaborators is being hidden.

The usual objection is commercial. Readers, we are told, are put off by translated books, and a second name on the cover reminds them that the book is a translation. I have never seen convincing evidence for this, and I have seen some against it. The publishers who put translators on their covers have not gone out of business. Some of them are doing rather well.

The second objection is aesthetic. Covers are crowded enough. I sympathise with designers, but a cover that has room for a quotation from a newspaper that most readers have never heard of has room for the name of the person who wrote the sentences.

The third objection is rarely spoken aloud, and it is the one that matters. It is the belief that translation is a lesser kind of writing, a craft rather than an art, a service rather than a work. I think this belief is wrong, and I think every translated book that hides its translator helps to keep it alive.

I do not want to overstate the case. There are bad translations, and a name on the cover will not make them better. There are authors who work so closely with their translators that the line between them blurs. And there are translators who prefer to stay out of sight, which is their right. But the default should be visibility. A reader has the right to know who wrote the words in their hands.

The next time you buy a translated book, look for the translator's name. If it is on the cover, notice it. If it is not, look inside, find it, and say it out loud when you recommend the book to a friend. It is a small thing. It is also, for most of us, the only credit we will ever get.