Training for Translators

Classes for translators and interpreters

Book translations


Corinne McKay

Breaking into the book translation market: master class on Thursday

This month’s Training for Translators master class, Breaking into the book translation market, is coming up this Thursday, October 20. The live class runs from 11 AM to 1 PM New York time, and everyone who registers receives the recording.

In this nuts-and-bolts master class, you’ll learn about the lifecycle of a book translation, from the idea stage to the rights arrangement, to finding a publisher and signing a contract, to marketing the book. We’ll also talk about self-publishing, and about translating books in the public domain. For many would-be book translators, doing the translation is the easy part: this class will allow you to confidently approach the not-so-easy, business-related parts of the book translation equation, and to anticipate how a book translation can go wrong. Open to translators who want to translate fiction, non-fiction, poetry, textbooks, or any other literary media.

Registration is $60 and includes the recording; I hope to see you there!


Corinne McKay

Afrikaans edition of Finding and Marketing to Translation Agencies

How cool is this? English to Afrikaans translator Laetitia Sullivan did an Afrikaans translation of my book, Finding and Marketing to Translation Agencies. You can purchase a copy here, or read more about it on Laetitia’s website. I’ve honestly never heard of any books about translation being translated into Afrikaans, so I’m excited that Laetitia took this project on!


Corinne McKay

Tips for frustrated literary translators

This post was originally published as a newsletter to my mailing list. An unusually large number of readers told me that they benefited from it, so I’m re-publishing it here while I’m on vacation.

It’s book prize season, the time of year when many of us admire, or even envy, our colleagues like Tess Lewis (PEN Translation Prize for her German to English translation of Maja Haderlap’s Angel of Oblivion) or Jessica Cohen (Man Booker International Prize for her Hebrew to English translation of David Grossman’s A Horse Walks Into a Bar). Lots of us fell in love with translation because of literary translation. As an example—of that phenomenon combined with teenage hubris–I translated Arthur Rimbaud’s poem Ophelia and did a reading of it, as my final project for my high school Shakespeare class in 1989…talk about teenage angst writ large. While that translation happily ended up in some unknown dumpster in New Jersey, many of us still dream of translating books–to bring our favorite authors to light in our target language or for a variety of other reasons.

Literary translation is a tough game. Major presses are reluctant to take a chance on an unknown author or an unpublished translator, literary translation can be more a labor of love than an income-generating activity, and the process of landing a contract is often much less straightforward than commercial translation projects are. Still, it’s possible; French to English translator Sandra Smith’s very first book translation was the smash hit Suite Française, which won the PEN award and was selected as Book of the Year by the Times of London. What’s a frustrated literary translator to do? Here are some tips!

Tip 1: Start with journals. If you’ve never done a book translation before, journals are a great place to start. Try to get a short story or an excerpt published (make sure you get permission from the translation rights-holder first, so that your publication triumph isn’t also a copyright violation). The PEN website has a long list of journals seeking work in translation. Research their submission guidelines and start there.

Tip 2: Look at resources for your language. Many countries–other than the US–actively support literary translations. There’s the French Publishers’ Agency, which brokers the English translation rights to books written in French. For German, there’s the Frankfurt Book Fair New York, and I’m sure that other languages have presences like this too.

Tip 3: Go to a summer camp. There are various literary translation summer schools where you can hone your craft and make some good contacts. The UK seems to be a hotbed of these kinds of things; the British Centre for Literary Translation runs this one (full for this year, but check back for future years), and City, University of London offers this one. Well-known Spanish to English literary translator Lisa Carter has this list from 2016 on her website, but a lot of these programs are probably running again in 2017.

Tip 4: Translate a book in the public domain and self-publish it. If you don’t feel like beating your head against the wall of the traditional publishing industry, bootstrap it. Sites like Project Gutenberg have tons of works in a huge range of languages, all in the public domain. You could start translating one of these books today and publish it on a blog, or make an e-book out of it, or do a print-on-demand edition. Just make absolutely sure that the book really is in the public domain before you publish it.

Tip 5: Go the traditional route and be prepared for a long haul. Being published by a traditional press is challenging, but far from impossible. If you feel that your favorite source language author absolutely must be translated into your target language, and that that translation absolutely must be published by a traditional publisher, don’t let the naysayers get you down. Go to the PEN list of publishers of works in translation, and get to it.

Bonus tip: Make your peace with the financial aspects of literary translation. If you are primarily or exclusively a commercial translator, you’re used to following the money and focusing on high-paying markets. And that chase is not likely to lead you anywhere near literary translation. But as long as the rest of your business is on solid financial footing, it’s OK to have a passion project in there somewhere. In fact, those passion projects can keep you motivated in the rest of your work. Which is not to say that there aren’t literary translators earning real money–there certainly are. But just as very few small-time authors are making a living from writing, many literary translators supplement their book translation income with commercial translation as well.


Corinne McKay

Translators for the win!

Book prize season is always fun, especially when translators get the spotlight. In 2015, the Booker Prize Foundation decided to award the Man Booker International Prize exclusively to works of fiction translated into English, as of the 2016 awards. Even better (if you’re a translator!) was their decision to split the 50,000 pound prize money equally between the author and the translator.

This year’s prize was announced yesterday, and we in Colorado are beyond thrilled to see our very own Denverite Jessica Cohen recognized for her Hebrew-to-English translation of David Grossman’s novel A Horse Walks Into a Bar. Jessica is a lovely and generous person as well as an incredible translator, and we had the good fortune to have her do a presentation on literary translation at our local mid-year conference a few years back.

If you’re looking for some summer reading, the books on the shortlist all look amazing. My only suggestion to the Booker Prize folks: tell us what language the books were translated from–translators like to geek out on those things!


Corinne McKay

Self-publishing: options for translators and authors

There are lots of people who know lots more about self-publishing than I do; but after 10 years in the trenches (yes, I’ve been self-publishing since before the iPhone existed!), I’ve had a bunch of hits and misses that might benefit other people. My experience in self-publishing comes from writing and self-publishing four of my own books, translating two books for self-published authors, and selling the translation rights (Portuguese, French and Italian) to one of my books. So here goes!

This post was prompted by an inquiry I received from a self-published author who’s finishing his first book (in French) and wants to have it translated into English. Many of the inquiries I receive from self-published authors run along these same lines: “I want to have my book translated into English; how much will it cost and how long will it take, and how does the process work?” Which are all reasonable questions. Eve Bodeux and I recently recorded a podcast on the nuts and bolts aspects of self-publishing (which we’ll release later this month–and we already released an episode about the actual books), but first let’s look at these more conceptual aspects.

The way I look at it, a self-published author-translator pair has three options:

  • The relatively traditional route, where the author essentially functions as the publisher, paying the translator (either all at once or in installments) to translate the book, and then handling the production and marketing aspects himself or herself.
  • The royalty-sharing route, where the translator receives little or no up-front payment, but receives some percentage of the royalties on the translated book, either for a defined period (like the first year) or indefinitely.
  • The translation rights sale route, where the author sells the translator the translation rights for the translator’s target language, and then it’s up to the translator to translate, publish and market the book.

The best option depends on the situation, and on your perspective. As a translator, I prefer the first option, where the author pays me (normally in installments) outright for the translation, normally under the same terms as a publisher would. See the PEN model contract for literary translations for an example. I always help with marketing the book to the extent that I can, but the onus to produce and sell the book is largely on the author. Whether this model is good for the author depends on the book’s sales potential; most of the book translations I’ve done run in the range of US $6,000-$9,000 for the translation. That’s definitely a lot of money for an independent author. But at the same time, investing that amount may give the author access to a much larger market (since I translate into English) than their original language does. For example I generally earn about US $500 a month in royalties on my business books for translators, so it would take 12-18 months to recoup that amount if the sales in the other language were similar. This relatively traditional model, perhaps in combination with a royalties arrangement, is also (probably..although I’ve been wrong before!) the most likely to appeal to established translators who earn their living from translation.

Then there’s the royalty-sharing option. On the face of it, this option can be a win-win for the author and the translator. Let’s say that the author and the translator agree to split the first two years of royalties 50/50. Theoretically, this gives the translator a strong incentive to do a good translation and help market the book, but it also relieves the author from fronting out thousands of dollars before the book is published. Great, right? My only concern is that this model is probably most appealing to beginning translators, or at least beginning book translators, who are still establishing their credentials and are thus more motivated to work in exchange for a promise of future revenue. For example I might have agreed to this kind of arrangement when I had never translated a book, but now (six books in…), I probably would not. There’s also a trust component: what if the author never gets around the publishing the translation, for example. And, as an author, you’d also want to find translators who have good contacts among people who might read your book, so that they can market it effectively.

Finally, there’s the translation rights sale route, which I’ve recently experienced with my own book (third edition of How to Succeed as a Freelance Translator). From the author perspective, I really like this method, and so far I’ve sold the translation rights for Portuguese, French and Italian. I don’t love the production aspects of self-publishing (layout, cover, indexing, etc.) and I don’t really have an interest in marketing my book in countries where I don’t speak the language. I allow the translators to pay in installments as long as they don’t publish the translation before the total amount is paid, and then the rest (production and marketing) is up to them; they can sell the translated book in print or electronic form worldwide. Again, it’s best if the translators can market the book within their existing networks. For me, this was fairly easy as my book is for translators; but if you wrote a book about dog training, you’d probably want to market the translation rights to translators who are also dog lovers, for example. However here again, there are risks: the translator might pay you, but never translate the book, or never publish the translation, or the translation might be horrid and there’s not a ton you can do about it.

I do feel that as self-publishing becomes less of an outlier and more a part of the mainstream publishing world, all of these translation-related options are becoming more viable as well. Self-published translations of self-published books are a logical extension of the explosion in self-publishing, and I think the translation industry is starting to see the effects of that. I also think that if you’re a frustrated literary translator, why not consider self-publishing your translations of books in the public domain, or looking for little-known but amazing authors who want their works translated? Small, traditional publishers have long remarked that when a non-US author’s work explodes, there’s a strong business case for having invested in English translation rights all along. Perhaps that mindset is now crossing over into the world of self-publishing!

Lots of food for thought here; over to you!