Why Book Translators Are Fighting for More Credit

That has led to a gold standard for translations into English where the translator and her work are invisible on the page. There is a dictum that a translation should read as though it was originally written in English: concise, declarative sentences, non-English words avoided or marked as foreign through italics, culturally specific references shifted or explained to avoid any confusion - the latter a tendency revealed in the Squid Game brouhaha, when some Korean-speaking viewers accused the show's subtitle writers of changing the dialogue so much that, as one person tweeted, "if you don't understand Korean you didn't really watch the same show." The art of subtitling is distinct from book translation, not least for its specific demands on rhythm and brevity, but it serves as a reminder that translation is inherently political. Much of the world thinks of it that way, notes writer and translator Madhu H. Kaza in the foreword to her groundbreaking 2017 anthology Kitchen Table Translation. Translation in an Anglophone context, however, has emphasized "an artfully inconspicuous technique."