The 2023 Manifesto on Literary Translation

Preface

In 1969, the PEN America Translation Committee produced a manifesto that opened with a call for action in advance of the 1970 “World of Translation” Conference, billed as the first international conference on literary translation held in the United States. The call for action reflected the drafters’ view of the state of translation at that time, focusing on the rights of the translator in the context of the publishing industry and translation studies in the academy. The manifesto called for raising the status of the translator, expanding the role of translation studies in the U.S., engaging publishers, and building translation resources. In 2020, the 50th Anniversary Conference “Translating the Future” reflected on how literary translation has changed since 1970 and invited a collective, international envisioning of what it may become over the next half century. In conjunction with the conference, a group of U.S.-based translators has drafted a new manifesto to address the art of literary translation in the twenty-first century, to renew and recalibrate calls for change in light of how the field has evolved, and to articulate what we want to see shift in the future.

Call to Action

We understand translation to be a creative art in its own right, even as it continues to be regarded as marginal and derivative by many in the greater literary community. In the more than fifty years since the PEN Translation Committee published its manifesto, we have taken meaningful steps toward legitimizing translation and the work of translators. National and international institutional structures have been established to recognize the cultural value of translation, while translation studies has emerged as a discipline that has opened up innovative ways of theorizing and practicing translation today.

Despite these advances and an increase in attention paid to translators in recent decades, the broader public and the publishing industry still misconstrue, obscure, and undervalue translation. In 2023, translators remain underpaid, often absent from book covers, and regarded as adjuncts to literary production. Most publishers do not prioritize the promotion of texts in translation, thus perpetuating an underperforming cycle of comparatively low print runs and sales along with the narrow readership that follows. Translators must continue to push for infrastructural change so that this crucial intellectual and artistic work is financially viable. We must also be vigilant about how we influence U.S. attitudes toward translation and non-Anglophone cultures through our work, as well as how we represent our work in public life.

We call for translation to be understood as a specialized form of writing. The lack of this acknowledgment has led not only to erasure of the translator’s labor, but also to a suppression of the social and political nature of the translator’s cultural work. In writing a translation, the translator establishes a set of interpretive relations with an existing text. The translator’s choices—including text selection—are inextricable from a given social and historical moment, and the translator’s aesthetic and ethical sensibilities shape the translated text for a new literary context, paving the way for dynamic and varied readings. To resort to notions of translation as purely mechanical reproduction or as “capturing” or being “faithful” to some aspect of the “original” eliminates the consideration of this cultural practice, thus reducing its artistic and intellectual possibilities—and also, necessarily, political ones—by attempting to confine the result to a single meaning. When seen as a particular kind of writing, translation emphasizes the myriad interpretations available and has the potential to combat the tendency to essentialize cultures and languages.

Translation plays a role in the globalization of everything from forms of artistic expression to laws, scientific knowledge, and politics, and it frames how readers in the U.S., including those who are multilingual, engage with other languages and cultures. As U.S.-based translators, we must recognize that we are positioned to resist or to perpetuate neoliberal globalization and its attendant forms of cultural imperialism, which have intensified asymmetrical relations among nations, peoples, cultures, and languages. Contending with the ethics of our translation work by acknowledging it as geopolitically charged presents an opportunity to intervene in U.S. cultural imperialism in particular. In the political and economic moment when this is being written—one in which the COVID-19 pandemic has further foregrounded our planetary interconnectedness as it has escalated the social inequities already deeply entrenched and heavily policed through hierarchies of race, gender, class, nation, citizenship, language, and culture—we are compelled to reassert a long-standing demand for a paradigm shift.

Every act of translation intervenes in the current geopolitical economy. With each one, a translator has the potential to actively contest and destabilize the damaging portrayals that sustain the forms of structural violence and exploitation that further entrench existing asymmetries. It is imperative not only that translations account for a larger percentage of U.S. cultural production but also that they be conscientiously situated within global frameworks and resist these portrayals. The new iterations of literary works that translators create through their interpretative labor may prompt readers to reconsider their assumptions and understandings of languages and cultures. Through this labor, translators have been (and a greater number of us should strive to be) advocates and change agents for more democratic forms of globalization, ones responsive to the overlapping histories of empire, settler colonialism, the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and white supremacy in the U.S. and beyond its borders, all of which translation has also been used to facilitate.

We announce this call for action in the belief that translation nonetheless has transformative global potential. More of us should join the translators who have been acknowledging and working against historical injustices and their ongoing legacies, to ensure that translation communities in the U.S. play a meaningful role in counteracting disparities in power and prestige among the world’s languages and peoples. We ought to approach our work in full awareness of the responsibility we bear given the history and geopolitical positioning of the U.S. and the global hegemony of English. We must resist flattening the gamut of human experiences by rendering them according to an inward-looking U.S.-Anglophone worldview. We call for the entire literary community to move forward with a critical approach that recognizes translation as the engaged, collaborative, and creative writing practice that it is.

Translation is a form of writing.

• We call on everyone who engages with translation to acknowledge it as a creative art in its own right, one that produces new work by negotiating between at least two socio-cultural and linguistic contexts.
• Translation must be understood as a specialized form of writing, which requires drawing on the translator’s own aesthetic sensibilities and interpretations.

Translation must be sustainable as a livelihood.

• We call on publishers, institutions, and translation organizations to recognize translation as a highly skilled form of artistic labor and to remunerate it accordingly, in a manner that makes translation financially viable as a profession.
• We call on publishers, institutions, and translation organizations to grant translators their legal and moral rights as creators of a new text in another language. Noting the framework of intellectual property law in the U.S., translators must receive copyright over their work, as well as continuing rights in the form of royalties and subsidiary rights while the translated text remains in print.

Translators have responsibilities.

• We call on translators to educate themselves and others to understand the cultural, social, racial, political, and linguistic contexts in which they work, and how translation can impact asymmetrical power relations. We challenge the tendency to assimilate texts from distinct cultural and historical contexts into a universalizing account of human experience.
• We call on translators to make their labor and expertise visible by the means available to them and to the extent that they are comfortable doing so.
• We call on translators to act as members of a broad and interconnected community; to treat our fellow translators and their work with dignity; to couch our debates and critiques of one another’s work in respect; to lift each other up professionally; to support those who have been subject to intimidation, harassment, and blacklisting within our field; and to work collectively to ensure fair treatment and compensation for all translators.
• We call on translators to be transparent about rates and terms, to not undercut colleagues in the field, and to engage in open conversations about unpaid work. Following such practices would benefit the community at large, just as not doing so has a detrimental effect on the profession of literary translators as a whole, especially those who rely on translation as their primary source of income.

Authors have responsibilities.

• We call on authors to recognize and acknowledge translators as creative partners.
• As partners, we call on authors to advocate within the literary community for translators to have a stake in and share the success of the author’s work in translation.

Publishers have responsibilities.

• We call on the U.S. publishing industry to radically alter its relationship with translators, treating them not as ancillaries to literary production, but as authors in their own right and as collaborators who should be supported, respected, nurtured, and enlisted at all stages of the process of publishing literature in translation.
• We call on publishers to invest in and publish more translators and writers of color and women, as well as queer, trans, nonbinary, genderqueer, D/deaf, disabled, and neurodivergent translators and writers.
• We call on publishers to invest in and publish more literature from languages that remain underrepresented in English translation.
• We call on publishers to critically examine cultural erasure and the fetishization of difference in regard to texts in translation.
• We call on publishers to recognize the work of translators by always prominently displaying the names of translators on the front cover.
• We call on publishers to always give the translator the copyright to the translation they have created and to always give the translator the right to continuing royalties as long as their translation is in print.
• We call on publishers to increase the visibility of translators by promoting their work and creating readings and public literary events that center the practice of translation and translators.
• We call on literary publications that pay authors to also pay translators for their work.
• We call on all leading literary journals and prizes to be open to the submission of translated texts.

Institutions have responsibilities.

• We call on professional organizations involved in translation to take actionable steps toward building a diverse national membership, such as by mentoring emerging translators of color and queer, trans, nonbinary, genderqueer, D/deaf, disabled, and neurodivergent translators, and centering these translators in event programming.
• In 2023, the practice of literary translation remains marginalized in the academy. We call on universities to abandon this prejudice by ceasing to undervalue literary translation as a form of rigorous scholarship and creative endeavor and to give more weight to translation in hiring and tenure and promotion cases.
• We call on universities to make training in the production and study of translations integral to any undergraduate or graduate discipline that depends on texts in translation for its teaching and research.

Book section editors and reviewers of translations have responsibilities.

• We call on reviewers to always name the translator of a translated work in their reviews.
• We call on book section editors to recognize the responsibility they have to promote informed discussion about books from not only a wide range of languages, countries, and literary traditions, but also a more diverse range of authors, translators, and presses. If there is no one on an editorial staff who can effectively engage with a work in translation—either linguistically or culturally—effort should be made to find a freelance reviewer or scholar who can do this work. A translation should not be excluded from review coverage simply because an editor does not speak or read the source language.
• We call on book sections and publications that pay authors to also pay reviewers for their work, particularly when specialized knowledge of a language or literature is required to provide nuanced critical coverage.
• We call on professional reviewers, even those who do not speak a language other than English, to be advocates for literature in translation by developing regional and/or language-based specializations. These specialist reviewers play a crucial role in both broadening the spectrum of literary reviews and underscoring the sociohistorical and aesthetic contexts out of which translations emerge.
• We call on reviewers of translations to be attentive to a translator’s agency. Translators make use of specific lexicons, literary styles, genres, registers, and cultural terms in the creation of a literary text. Understanding how these linguistic and cultural resources have been utilized is essential to understanding how a translation fits into the wider literary landscape

Teachers have responsibilities.

• We call on teachers who use translated works of literature in their classroom to present them to students as translations.
• We call on teachers to recognize translators whose work is read and studied and to provide and discuss information about them and their translation method, whenever possible.
• We call on teachers to discuss with students the qualitative differences between and among multiple translations of a text and to note why a particular translation has been chosen over others, especially if only one is used in the classroom.
• We call on teachers to provide students with guidance on how to read, analyze, and evaluate a translation.
• We call on teachers to present translation to students as a scholarly discipline with its own history, including translation scholarship from non-Western traditions.
• We call on teachers to invite students—especially students who are multilingual, heritage-language speakers, or from other backgrounds underrepresented in the U.S. translation community—to envision themselves as future translators. We particularly encourage teachers to mentor these students.

Readers have responsibilities.

• We call on readers to actively seek to read works in translation and to read them as translations.
• We call on readers to engage with those works and to consider themselves part of the literary translation community by, for example, requesting libraries and bookstores to carry works in translation; requesting that libraries, bookstores, and cultural centers include translators in literary events; or providing comments on the translated works they have read on bookseller websites and other online venues.

Race and Racism in Literary Translation in the U.S.

The relative paucity of conversations about race and racism in the field of translation is alarming, but perhaps not surprising, given the way translators of color have historically been excluded from the field. We echo the call by translators of color for an end to silence concerning racialized exclusion within the translation community. The United States not only produces a large amount of literature for world consumption and funds little work in translation, but it also maintains unequal access to resources, education, and institutions through structural racism. There has yet to be a full reckoning with the role played by translators—including literary translators—in genocide, colonization, and enslavement, all of which continue to influence how the field operates today. As translators working within this cultural context, our work must be informed by rigorous discussions about how race and racism function in the field; we must challenge the status quo regarding institutional and cultural biases that perpetuate racism in all its forms. Concrete action must be taken in terms of who has access to the profession, how race and racialized language are translated, and how the work of authors and translators of color is disseminated and received.

Translators of Color

The majority of U.S. translators are white, the existing translation organizations are majority white-led, and efforts to diversify the field have largely relied on exploiting the intellectual and creative labor of people of color. These conditions exist both as the effects of historical racism in the field and also as the causes of current and ongoing barriers to access for translators of color. Given the complex ways that race intersects with economic precarity, any moves towards a true dismantling of structural racism must be material. Discussions about racism in the field and how translators are positioned within these racialized and racializing structures are only a first step toward concrete action. We must make changes within the infrastructure that supports translation:

• The range of spaces in which conversations about race in the field are held should be expanded beyond traditional institutions (e.g., within academia, major translation organizations, the translation publishing industry) to include kitchen-table and grassroots spaces, such as domestic/home spaces and community-oriented public spaces.
• Publishers should avoid asking for unpaid labor from translators of color, especially if it is in service of “diversifying” their catalog or masthead. Given barriers to institutional knowledge, publishers also have the responsibility to be more transparent regarding their missions, mastheads, salaries, payments, royalties, contracts, and timelines, so that translators do not bear the burden of guessing or asking about practices that might be exclusionary for translators of color.
• Institutions (publishers, organizations, universities, etc.) have the responsibility to raise—and, if necessary, divert—funds to hire more people of color; raise salaries and rates to increase access for people without generational wealth; create endowments for degree programs, internships, fellowships, scholarships, residencies, conferences, professional development opportunities, etc., for people of color; and offer free or discounted application, submission, membership, registration, and class fees, etc.
• More spaces, workshops, events, and networking opportunities should be created for translators of color.
• Translators of color should not be treated as spokespeople for diversity issues and should be offered opportunities beyond those in which only diversity/race is being discussed. All participants and attendees of events, workshops, and other programs—especially those who are white—have the responsibility to be vocal to the organizers of programs and events that feature only white translators.
• White publishers, editors, and translators have the responsibility to take on more of the extra work that many publishers, editors, and translators of color have been doing to combat racial inequities and exclusion in the field.
• Publishers and editors have the responsibility to interrogate and expand their understandings of language “mastery” and expertise, in consideration of translators with nontraditional language acquisition and immigration histories.

Translating Race and Authors of Color

Measures must also be taken to publish more authors of color in English translation. Translators, publishers, editors, and readers have a responsibility to examine the types of literature that are and are not being translated from different languages and cultures, including the inequities—in terms of both quantity and content—between literature by white authors and authors of color. Literary translation is a prime context in which translators can and should resist the drive to commodify cultural and linguistic differences by pushing the bounds of the styles, dialects, and discourses we use when translating authors of color and race within a text. Translators must continue to develop strategies that challenge the pervasive tendency to assimilate and domesticate texts into universalizing accounts of human experience. We should play an active role in destabilizing homogenizing cultural, linguistic, and canonical norms through the versions of texts we create.

• Translators, editors, and publishers have a responsibility to interrogate—and the right to be supported in challenging—the persistent use of standard dialects of U.S. and U.K. English, which are usually associated with norms of whiteness, as the default target language.
• Translators, publishers, and editors have a responsibility to be conscientious about and to support translation choices that are made in a text to explain concepts about a country, language, or culture that may be seen as not readily familiar, accessible, or understandable to a presumed general, Western, majority-white readership. This includes choices to leave words in the original language and whether or not to italicize them.
• Translators should be vigilant about not imposing U.S. conceptions of race on texts by authors writing from and about racial dynamics in other countries. Translators should strategically use language to challenge dominant paradigms of racial frameworks in the U.S. in order to highlight the complexity of such categories, their social and linguistic construction, and their diverse histories.
• When translating racism within a text, translators have a responsibility to examine the intentions behind the treatment of race and consider the harm certain choices may cause. One possible strategy for clarifying their attendant language choices is the inclusion of paratextual materials, such as introductions, forewords/afterwords, and translator’s notes.
• White translators have a responsibility to evaluate their positioning and qualifications in translating certain texts and, in some cases, to recommend translators of color instead.
• Translators, writers, and publishers have a responsibility to consider the implications of using a bridge translation, a practice in which a “literal” translation is prepared by a source-language expert and generally “polished” by a writer or translator with little or no knowledge of the source language. We need to interrogate the notions of difference between “literary” and “bridge” translators, which are often predicated on problematic and harmful ideas of literariness and language expertise that are inextricable from race, since bridge translations occur more frequently for translations from non-white-majority cultures where the source-language expert is treated as a “native informant” who cannot “master” English themselves. We understand “bridge” translations to be co-translations, which should be credited as such.

Publishing Market and Reception

Historically, how texts by authors of color have circulated and been received has been shaped by settler colonialism, imperialism, and chattel slavery, and these power relationships persist in U.S. publishing. The work of authors of color in translation is often fetishized and treated as a commodity to be consumed, an anthropological text providing access to an “exotic” culture, or an anti-racist text for the edification of a white audience. While some publishers have diversified their catalogs, the work of authors of color is often tokenized or asked to represent an entire culture, since so few texts by authors from non-white-majority cultures and/or writing in non-European languages are published in translation in the U.S.

• Publishers, editors, and translators must take into account the way the work is situated within the complex, historically determined relationship between the source text, its literary and cultural contexts, and the geopolitical and cultural imperialism of the U.S.
• Publishers, editors, and translators must question tendencies toward tokenization when marketing, publishing, and translating works from literary traditions underrepresented in the U.S. by engaging in critical dialogue at all stages of the publishing process to neither erase cultural specificity nor fetishize difference. Publishers, editors, and translators selecting texts for translation and publication must move beyond white supremacist norms of what makes for “great” literature. They must also avoid rejecting projects by authors of color with the excuse that “there is no market or reader” for such texts because they haven’t been published before.
• Publishers, editors, and translators should avoid cover art and other packaging and marketing materials that exotifies texts by authors of color.
• Reviewers and readers should reflect on the assumptions they bring to bear about the value and uses of translated literature by authors of color.
• Translators should draw attention to innovative perspectives on translation theory and practice, and this has to prioritize supporting and amplifying the work of translators and theorists of color, whose work is currently marginalized.