The Value of Differences

Translators are usually passionate about language - their own and others’ - and about other places. You don’t sink into a translation project, which can take at least a year or two out of your life, to get attention or to earn big money. Appreciation is satisfying, though - not necessarily for oneself, but for the art. Translation prizes and book reviews are where you expect such appreciation to be found. Someone noticed. 

When in 2015 the Booker Prize Foundation announced that, from 2016 onwards, the Man Booker International Prize, which had been awarded every second year to an author for their entire body of work, was to be reborn as the International Booker Prize for fiction in translation, translators welcomed this as a sign of growing appreciation for their art. The generous prize money of £50,000 for a single book was to be shared between translator and author. So far, nine awards have been given – to books originally written in Korean, Hebrew, Polish, Arabic, Dutch, French, Hindi, Bulgarian and German. Their translators have received acclaim, and the prize has helped other translators step out from invisibility. Increasingly, they are credited, named on book covers, sought by publishers, and receive better contractual terms. The IBP has also influenced other translation prizes worldwide. 

But how much have things really progressed? While the International Booker might have heralded a rise in the status of literary translators, is there a commensurate deepening of appreciation for, and understanding of, translation itself? While translators are being made more visible, is translation being made more invisible? 

What is it that gets rewarded, targeted, and neglected by translation prizes? Let us stay with the International Booker. The prize is limited to books translated into English. (For the sake of comparison, a study of international prizes for translation into languages other than English is sorely needed). Entries must be books published (or co-published) in the UK or Ireland, and submissions be made by publishers. The translation must have been published within a one-year period (May-April) prior to the closing date. The prize is annual.  

In its 2021 press release, the Prize stated that its aim is ‘to encourage more reading of quality fiction from all over the world’. So far, so good, but that noble aim is significantly qualified when the criteria are scrutinised. First, it is clearly a prize intended to encourage British publishers to publish more literature in translation. They submit entries not just because of an altruistic motive of nurturing translation, but also because a win or a short-list nomination significantly lifts sales. Fair enough. Second, the prize – like the main Booker Prize, which is awarded to an original work of fiction written in English – targets recent books. For the International Booker, however, both author and translator must be living at the time of submission, thereby favouring books that are also recently published in their original language. In short, the English language publisher is looking for a ‘new book’. Third, while I could find no explicit stipulation on this, the prize does not appear to promote re-translations. Clearly, this disqualifies a lot of international ‘quality fiction’.  

When I accessed the Booker Prizes website in December 2024, it stressed the equivalence of the Booker Prize and the International Booker Prize:  

Media releases for the IBP winners also stress ‘this symmetrical relationship’, blurring the uniqueness of translated work, and, one might say, blurring translation. Despite the elevation of the translator to co-prizewinner, translation itself appears almost incidental. I am struck by how little specific comment there is on it. The emphasis is on ‘the book’ – new, disturbing, pathbreaking, original, lyrical, shocking, powerful, or beautiful. It is almost as though translation is downplayed in order for the book to be accepted as something on par with fiction originally written in English.  

Am I overreacting? Let me be clear and applaud the IBP, which is bringing exciting literature from other languages to English-language readers like me. I just want to read more about the skill, labour, and artistry of translation. I want to know how that beautiful, disturbing, path-breaking and unique book was shaped in and by its original language, without which it wouldn’t exist. I want to know more about how it moved into English language prose. I want more respect for translation – for the difference between languages – and how that difference works within particular books.  

The IBP’s Q and A with long-listed writers and translators (posted on the Booker Prize website) is where one does find illuminating comments from writers about their translators, and from translators about what they do. Shortlisted in 2024 for her translation from Spanish of Not a River, Annie McDermott says, ‘I’ve always loved to write, and here was “pure writing”, as Nabokov has called it: dealing entirely with the words themselves, while someone else takes care of the characters and plot.’ The book’s author Selva Almada comments, ‘I feel comfortable and confident with [McDermott], because I see her efforts to capture the music of the writing, the lyricism, the colloquial aspects, which are very important to me in the construction of my narrative.’ Another member of the 2024 shortlist, Kira Josefsson, who translated Ia Genberg’s The Details from Swedish, observes, ‘Part of what’s fun about translation is getting to push and stretch linguistic conventions of the language you’re translating into, but of course it needs to be done elegantly or at least interestingly to work; it needs to make sense.’  These brief comments are illuminating because they talk about the process of rendering the original into English, and what the translator was dealing with. They are not merely comments about the English language prose.  

With translation prizes, one would assume that judges hone in on just this process. How else would they assess a translated literary work? One would also assume that the manner – and quality – of assessment fundamentally differs depending on whether a group of judges is assessing translated works from a single language (known to all or most of them), or, as with the Booker International, from any language (many or even all of which are known to none of them).  

The problems with the latter situation were highlighted by writer and translator Tim Parks in his 2016 New York Review of Books essay, ‘Raw and Cooked’, after Korean author Han Kang and her translator Deborah Smith won the first IBP in the new format for The Vegetarian. Noting that ‘none of the judges for the prize appear to know Korean’, Parks comes to a conclusion about the basis of assessment: ‘there is a shared vision of what critics would like a work of “global fiction” to be and that The Vegetarian has managed to present itself as a candidate that can be praised in those terms.’ His questions – about how judges assess a translation if they don’t know the original language, and the possibility of discerning ‘separate impressions of the achievements of writer and translator’ – remain as pertinent as ever. Some might approach his questions in terms of the endless philosophical discussion about translation itself. I am more interested in the practical issues his questions raise. With prestigious prizes such as the International Booker, are any of the judges required to read the translations beside the originals, or seek outside expertise if they can’t? And is that done equally, at least for all the long-listed books? What are judges really looking for?  

At the time of The Vegetarian’s 2016 IBP win, British arts critic Vincent Dowd commented:  

This last sentence is an oft-touted yet problematic measure for the quality of translations. That something reads as though originally written in English is a comment on the English, not on the translation (and let’s face it, the English prose may owe much to the alchemy of editors). While this type of fluency is a perfectly fine goal for a translator to have, the degree to which this is striven for, and attained, is a matter of choice. What such comments overlook is precisely what we need to know more about: rendition of style, tone, voice and register. There are two different levels: the original and its English language rendition. Surely a translator is not ‘turning the [original] language into high-quality English’, as though the original is not ‘high-quality’ in the first place, and as though assimilability to the English language were the sole measure of quality.  

To be clear, my comments are less about translation itself than the commentary on it – how our language of evaluation constantly slips out of view, even and perhaps most noticeably in the fora where we most expect it. From prize citations to reviews, we need to have processes that address how the translator worked with the original text to achieve the translated text. A comparison of the IBP with prizes for literature translated from a single language is revealing in this regard. There are many such prizes globally, sponsored by governments, private trusts and universities. In the UK, the Society of Authors administers prizes for literary translation from Arabic, Dutch, French, German (two prizes), Hebrew, Italian, Greek, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, and Japanese. Criteria vary across these prizes, but they have one thing in common: all the prizes but one require the submission of both the original text and the translation. The understanding is that for all the prizes, judging will include assessment of the translation by judges qualified to read it beside the original language. For instance, the four-person jury of the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for translators of contemporary Arabic literature is comprised of two members who read only the English translations, and two who read both the Arabic originals and the English translations.  

Attention to the original text for single language translation prizes produces intelligent jury insights into the uniqueness of both the translated text and the original work. Take, for example, the citation for the 2023 Scott-Moncrieff Prize-winning translation from French of Standing Heavy by GauZ’: 

Or the citation for the Bernard Shaw Prize-winning translation from Swedish of Strega by Lykke Holm: 

While still necessarily succinct, such jury citations are a far cry from clichéd remarks about translations reading as though originating in English. 

For international prizes for literary translation into English from any language, the IBP is indisputably at the top for prestige, prize money and media attention, but the prize landscape is really quite varied. Overall, literary translation prizes can be categorised into those that focus on ‘a recent book’ (like the IBP) and those that do not (or not exclusively). In the United States, both the National Book Award for Translated Literature and the PEN Translation Prize are for recent publications by US publishers. (The former is shared between author and translator, the latter is awarded to the translator only.) The International Dublin Literary Award, shared between author and translator, is for a recent work of fiction either written in or translated into English, and uniquely its entries are nominations made by public libraries throughout the world. The American Literary Translators Association’s annual National Translation Award is also for ‘a recent work’, but is unusual among international translation prizes for its breadth: it is awarded to a book translated from any language by translators of any nationality, with submissions from publishers anywhere. Translations of both previously untranslated contemporary works and first-time translations of older works, and occasionally even important re-translations are all eligible for the prize. Outside of the single-language translation prizes, it appears to be the only international translation prize for a published work that includes evaluation of the source-language text.  

Some literary fiction prizes that were previously only for works written in English now include translated fiction without any notification of policy change or any criteria specific to the assessment of translated works. The ‘books’ are considered against each other as though they are all the same. An example is Australia’s prestigious annual Miles Franklin literary prize awarded to ‘a novel which is of the highest literary merit and presents Australian life in any of its phases’. In 2024, a work of translated fiction – Sanya Rushdi’s Hospital, a translation from Bengali into English – made the shortlist for the first time, although the translator, Arunava Sinha, received barely a mention, and media coverage made no comment about the translation.  

Some translation prizes have narrowed their focus from evaluation of a translator’s ‘body of work’ to the Booker’s ‘recent book’ model. Such is the case with the biennial NSW Premier’s Translation Prize for an Australian translator.1 Before 2020, the prize claimed to ‘recognise an outstanding translator, rather than a particular work of translation’, according to the 2005 NSW Ministry for the Arts guidelines. Translators had to be Australian citizens or permanent residents, but their authors and publishers could be from anywhere. The support dossier required a recent publication together with selected previous publications chosen to showcase a body of work, copies of reviews, and support letters from ‘literary referees’. However, there was no requirement to submit any example of original language texts, and no transparency about how translation was evaluated. 

In 2020, the focus, criteria, submission procedure, and prize money were changed. Still biennial, the prize is now for a single book published within the previous two years. Submissions are made through an online portal, with copies of the book supplied directly by the publisher. There is still no requirement to include the source text or a sample extract from it; citizenship requirements for the translator, and the open location of publisher and author remain the same. The prize money, however, has doubled from $15,000 to $30,000, with no requirement for it to be shared between translator and author, making this prize now one of the most generous in the world for translators. Why was it changed? This is a question I asked of the organisers in 2021 when seeking clarification about how the prize now operated. The explanation was that the previous ‘body of work’ model had such a dwindling pool of applicants (from which previous winners were excluded) that the prize was in danger of being closed altogether. While the International Booker model was not specifically mentioned, I suspect it was influential for the revamp, even though the Australian prize has no stipulation that the translated author be living. 

Despite the opportunity to bring more attention to translation, when the shortlist for the NSW Premier’s Translation Prize was announced for the first time in the new format in 2021, there was no mention of which language any of the books had been translated from, let alone any insightful comments about the translations themselves. There was also no transparency about how the judges assessed the translation, or whether outside expert comment was sought. It was all about ‘the book’, yet nowhere in the published criteria is there any mention of what kind of book the prize is looking for. But in this the prize is not alone. 

Why is there often so little explicit comment on the assessment of translation, even in translation prizes? Perhaps there is a larger prejudice here against scrutiny of translation as overly academic, an exercise in smug pedantry hampering creative freedom. Deborah Smith’s defensive reaction to the controversy after her 2016 IBP win would suggest this, reverting to an old bugbear: ‘Han, who is Korean, and Smith, who is British (and learnt Korean because she saw few of its books in English) treated the translation as an imaginative rather than literal word-for-word exercise.’ [emphasis added] The opposition is nonsense, of course. It is precisely close attention to a text’s translation and the original text that reveals the imaginative specificity of choice – the ways that voice, register, rhythm, phrasing, and tone are rendered in this particular instance – and the art of literary translation to be a kind of musical or dramatic performance of the original notation or script.  

Inattention to translation is not limited to prizes for translated literature; it is also found in reviews of translated books. As an exercise, I surveyed reviews of translated literary fiction and poetry in the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, and the Australian Book Review over the course of 2023.2 I wanted to see how much translated literature was reviewed, and how it was done. What did the reviewers notice?  

In terms of the frequency of reviews, the winner by a country mile was the NYRB, with thirty-two reviews of translated literary fiction and poetry over twenty issues (and another eight reviews of translated non-fiction). It was difficult to find an issue where there was not at least one review of translated literature. The LRB was no slouch either, with twenty-six reviews of fiction and poetry over twenty-four issues (and another seven reviews of non-fiction). The ABR trailed a long way down – at only nine reviews of translated literary fiction and poetry over twenty-two issues (and another seven non-fiction). Notably, only the NYRB included the source language in the review titles. The fact that the other journals did not is often problematic; a curious reader has to look for clues to discover the original language in which the book under review was written. Overall, the review articles fell into three categories: those that focused on a single book; those that focused on the work of a single author, with more than one translated book by the same or various translators; and reviews of recent re-translations of well-known (usually old) books.  

Of the thirty-two NYRB reviews, nineteen of them discuss the translation, many in detail. This compares to thirteen of the LRB’s twenty-six reviews, and only three of the ABR’s nine reviews. The other reviews either do not mention the translation at all or make an unsubstantiated comment (‘ably translated by’, ‘superbly translated by’, an ’elegant’, ‘meticulous’, ‘capable’, ‘dexterous’, ‘perfect pitch, ‘fluid’, ‘flawed’, or ‘readable’ translation, and so forth). When I say ‘unsubstantiated’, I mean that the reviewers do not explain how they arrived at their judgement: they are merely making a passing comment on the English and how it reads to them. The prose or verse reads elegantly, so it is an ‘elegant translation’. But the translation and how the English reads are not the same thing. One might rather say, ‘here is an example of the translator’s elegant solution to rendering such-and-such’, showing some thought about the translation. (Sometimes I wonder whether part of the problem in talking in English about translation isn’t the word itself, which can refer ambiguously to both process and product. In the language I translate from, Indonesian, there is a distinction between the act, penerjemahan, and the end result, terjemahan. I am sure this distinction is true of many other languages.)  

In the most engaging reviews, we follow the reviewer’s thoughts about the challenges of the particular translation under review and their familiarity with the original language. They comment on choices made. They ask interesting questions. We learn something. Take, for instance, the novelist Anjum Hasan’s review in the NYRB of the IBP prize-winning book, Tomb of Sand, by Geetanjali Shree, translated from the Hindi by Daisy Rockwell. Hasan praises the translation for its ‘recreation of Shree’s animated, conversational, on occasion rambling style’, and gives examples. She points out the novel’s language play and the translator’s handling of this, and again gives examples. She talks about translation in general and how ‘a book and its translation inevitably speak to different things in their separate literatures’, and then gives examples of how this book and its English translation do that. This is a review that teaches the reader about the original and makes you want to read the translation.  

Writer and critic Anahid Nersessian similarly moves between the general and the particular in her insightful reviews. Her NYRB essay, ‘The Republic of Translation’, discusses two books of translated poetry from two different authors and two different languages (Italian/Sardinian and French). Drawing her attention back from close discussion of details in the original texts (idiom, rhythm, acoustics, word connotations), she praises Lindsay Turner’s translation from Stephane Bouquét’s French as ‘a whole new object, neither original nor variant, but a lustrous synthesis of sensibilities’.  This is high praise, but her review shows us how she came to this view. She can also be wonderfully direct in her criticism. Reviewing two books by Meret Oppenheim – one translated by Lisa Wenger and  Martina Corgnati, the other by Kathleen Heil – for the LRB, she again pays close attention to detail and isn’t fooled by the translator’s claims to creative license: ‘There is creative translation or what Heil calls “seizing freedom from the language one is working with”, and then there is making stuff up.’  

Veteran reviewers like Parks and Michael Hofmann, renowned translators themselves, always have interesting things to say in their reviews of translated fiction. Apart from general discussion of the (original) book, its author and context, there is analysis of style – tone, voice, idiom and rhythm, for instance – and any other idiosyncrasies – use of dialect, profanity, colloquialism, humour – as well as commentary on how the translator has navigated the challenges of rendering these stylistic characteristics. Both sides of the work – the book and its translation – are considered, sometimes sharply. In his review of Jonathan Franzen and Jenny Watson’s translation of a Thomas Brussig novel in the NYRB, Hofmann rips the original book apart, then asks the all-important (but so rarely asked) question, ‘why translate it?’ He gives an example of East German slang rendered as Kansas English, and comments on wordplay. ‘Sometimes’, he says, ‘the language is telling us, “Uh-oh, don’t touch this,” and then it’s probably worth listening.’  

One part of the reviewing world where close attention is paid to creative choice in translation – indeed, to creative choice as the art of translation – is the case of re-translation. This is where we do find recognition, and celebration, of myriad possibilities in rendering a text into another language. This is exactly where we delight in reading and hearing the familiar in a new way, as with Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey, or Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf. Reviews of re-translations proceed from the awareness of difference between the original (the worth of which has been established by the very fact of its perpetuity) and its translated renditions – and perhaps it is not surprising that these reviews can be so illuminating about translation in general. The existence of previous translations pushes the reviewer to look not just for ‘fluidity’ or ‘smoothness’ in the translated text, but also for how this new version might make us think about context and interpretation. A wonderful example of this is Michael Wood’s review of Brian Nelson’s 2024 translation of the first volume of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, The Swann Way, alongside James Grieve’s translation, Swann’s Way, first published in 1982. Wood offers deep reflections on changes in interpretation not just of the literary work, but of the entire social world that shaped it. The reprinting of Grieve’s version, Wood says, ‘is a perfect invitation to time-travel in the world of translation’. He adds:  

He gives examples where Grieve’s translation of dialogue feels rather clunky today, but he finds ‘the value of differences’ there. Importantly, given the rote privileging of fluency in the assessment of translations: 

Comparing translations reveals convergences and differences; minor variants can shift our perception.  

It is probably unreasonable to hope that reviews of translated literature or translation prize citations will reach the level of attention and insight that one finds in many reviews of re-translations, but at the very least, we might hope that reviewers and judges notice it is translation they are evaluating. But short of this, what else might we hope for the assessment of translation? 

Judges and organisers of literary prizes of all kinds are notoriously cagey about assessment procedures, but there could be more clarity about criteria and priorities for a start. If translation prizes are focused on ‘a book’, this could be more clearly outlined in the submission criteria. What kind of book? One that has already received attention and accolades in its original language; or a new book by an author well-known in their original language, and/or whose previous work has been translated into English; or, conversely, are they looking for something unknown – perhaps a work from a language that has not yet been honoured with the prize? If the emphasis is on ‘compelling’ new fiction the translation of which has been deemed ‘important’, then how do the judges determine this? Might it be that the book addresses topical contemporary issues (gender or migration, for instance)? Or present local context vividly and in a way that speaks to a global readership? Provide new historical insight? Enlighten us in a different way of thinking? The Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize (for translations from living European languages) is unusual in that it actually spells out what is elsewhere usually unsaid, ‘[t]he judges will consider the quality of the translation as well as the importance of the original work and the value of its being put into English’, even if it does not elaborate on what might make the original work ‘important’.  

Does the desire for novelty or urgency extend beyond thematic considerations to stylistic ones, too? Are the judges particularly interested in works that, through their translation, stretch English prose, or the novel’s form? Are they asking, for instance, how the translator has handled the particular stylistic innovations and challenges of this particular work? In their reading, are they considering unity not only of style and content in the English rendition, as Parks pointed out in his 2016 essay, but the relation between style, content, and language – that is, are they looking out for something inherent to the language and world of the original that allowed its conception in the first place, a conception that might not have occurred in English? When awarding the 2019 IBP to author Jokha Al-harthi and translator Marilyn Booth for Celestial Bodies, the chair of the judging panel, British historian Bettany Hughes, emphasised: ‘[W]e felt we were getting access to ideas and thoughts and experiences you aren’t normally given in English. It avoids every stereotype you might expect in its analysis of gender and race and social distinction and slavery.’ While the Arabic language is not explicitly mentioned in Hughes’ remarks, it at least tries to do justice to the difference that language makes.  

There are also more mundane, practical issues. Time lag is an issue, particularly for translation prizes with publication date restrictions that focus on recent books. Publishers must find books and books publishers, with translators themselves often the scouts who pitch books to publishers. Translation takes time – a novel probably takes, on average, at least a year (according to Hofmann’s calculation). Then follows the publishing process. A new book that causes a stir in its original language might take at the very least three or four years to be published in translation, only for attention to be diverted to a newer, more topical book. The original author might even have died in the meantime. The ineligibility of re-translations for translation prizes is also problematic. The demand for a ‘living author’ is one hurdle, and ‘not previously published’ another. But surely a re-translation is just as much a discovery, an affording of ‘newness’.  

My overarching question, though, is whether translation prizes and reviews help create a better eco-system for translation. Given the limited resources for funding literary translation, are prizes currently distributed in an optimal way? What incentives could there be for a wider and more robust reviewing culture for translated work?  

There might be ways to encourage translation prizes and reviews to better complement each other. Literary journals could publish more reviews of translated fiction, and include more review essays comparing translations. They might even offer a prize for a review essay of literary translation to be judged by translators. Another suggestion is to translate book reviews themselves, showing how a book was reviewed in its original language or in languages other than English into which it had been translated. These avenues would provide additional sources of income for translators and broaden commentary on translation beyond the Anglosphere. Finally, there is always room for more essays or interviews with literary translators about their work, and with authors about their translators. Journals like Words Without Borders are doing a fabulous job in highlighting translation in its myriad forms and approaches, fostering dialogue, and ‘helping writers and translators thrive’. Their holistic approach to the translation eco-system – which includes their Ottoway Award for translators, publishers, and advocates of translation, and their persistence in publishing excerpts of translated books and interviews with translators and publishers of translation – is exemplary. There is plenty of inspiration there for more mainstreaming of translation in non-specialist literary journals.  

Similarly, the mainstreaming of translated fiction in international literary prizes (including the IBP) is a positive trend – as long as it does not ignore or diminish specialist attention to translation. Literary prizes should highlight and reward the expertise of translators, who could be employed as outside assessors, providing commentary on source texts to juries (as happens with the National Translation Award, which sends all longlisted books to experts for reading beside the original language). Such a process would foster more dialogue between judges and translators, and between translators themselves. In some cases, prize money might be re-distributed to allow a portion of those funds to be put towards such consultation. There is also plenty of room to experiment with existing prize structures to target different criteria. A recurring award could easily become an umbrella prize, with regularly changing criteria (and, possibly, prize money): this time living authors only, another time not; this time open to re-translations, another time not; this time for publishers from a single country, other times open to publishers anywhere. Perhaps once a decade or so, the prize could be awarded for a translator’s body of work. 

Translators worldwide might now be stepping out on stage to share a prize, and long may it be so, but the fight remains to lift the art of translation from invisibility, too. The majority of English-language readers across the globe who live at the heart of the commercial and cultural dominance of English-language publishing need particular encouragement to notice translation from other languages, something that more polyglot readers of other tongues take for granted. Done well, prizes and reviews can help with that.