The packed sessions at the London Book Fair’s 16-year-old Literary Translation Center are confirmation that literary translators are always seeking new ways to improve their situation.

By Olivia Snaije, Contributing Editor

As translation rights were being bought and sold at the 2026 London Book Fair’s buzzing International Rights Center, across the hall in the Literary Translation Center, panels addressed several continuing concerns for translators.

In one panel, titled “Getting Out of the Margins: Five Years of #TranslatorsOnTheCover, translator Ruth Martin moderated a discussion with academic Peter Freeth, translator Ecre Karadag, and bookseller, translator, and host of It’s Lit in Translation podcast Evelyn Heis, that took stock of the past five years since translator Jennifer Croft and author Mark Haddon launched an open letter at the Society of Authors calling on publishers to include translator’s names on book covers. Nearly 3,000 authors have since signed the open letter.

The translators generally agreed that getting their names on book covers has become more widespread. Independent publishers seem to be making an effort, the panelists noted, and more established publishers are at least thinking about it.

Martin said that, between 2011 and 2021, she translated 13 books from German to English and never had her name on the cover. Since 2021, however, she said she has received a cover credit on eight of of the 11 books she has translated.

As a younger translator, Karadag said that when she gets a contract, she immediately asks if her name will be on the cover. “It used to be seen as something radical, and steeped in shame. Now it seems more normal to get credit.” Having your name on a book cover is not only important not just for visibility, Freeth added, but because it will also appear in metadata.

The manager of an independent bookshop, two years ago, Heis told attendees that she made the decision to install a shelf that separated translated fiction from general titles. Although this could be seen as controversial for some who claim that translated fiction should be “normalized,” in her experience, Heis said it “massively” increased sales. “People know they will be delving into new languages and regions and will look for more books by a same translator.”

Although in the U.K. and the U.S. people used to shy away from translated fiction titles, that is no longer the case, at least in the U.K., Martin said, recalling the 2023 data compiled by Nielsen for the Booker Prize Foundation which found that younger readers in particular are reading more translated fiction.

To this point, Karadag said that more children’s fiction in translation and bilingual books needed to be published in order to make it more “normal.”

Once translators’ names are on book covers what else can be done to help them? Better pay, more integration into metadata, and being taken on as clients by agents, reducing the amount of unpaid labor involved for many translators.

‘What Publishers Don’t Know’

A second panel, titled Translators as Agents: A Solution for Less Translated Literatures?,  further addressed the unpaid labor often undertaken by translators.

A European Network for Literary Translation (Enlit) event, Alexandra Büchler, director of Literature Across Frontiers, moderated a discussion with translator and president of CEATL (Conseil européen des associations de traducteurs littéraires) Francesca Novajra, and two literary translators who became agents, Edgar de Bruin, and Karolina Jaszecka.

Büchler began the session by recalling the late Ray Güde Mertin, a translator and professor of Portuguese language and literature who set up the Frankfurt-based  Mertin-Witt agency in 1982, now run by Nicole Witt, that represents Portuguese and Spanish authors.

De Bruin, a Czech translator founded his agency in 2003 representing Czech authors, while Jaszecka, a Polish, Spanish and Catalan translator based in Barcelona, now represents Polish authors and publishers of children’s books, comics, and graphic novels.

De Bruin said that becoming an agent was not fundamentally different from what he did as a translator from a lesser-known language. “We know what publishers don’t know,” he said, adding that he only represents books that he likes. Finding a way into the challenging English-language market is often easier if he is first able to get a book translated into German, he observed, adding that German publishers will often take a chance on a new author from a lesser-known language.

Jaszecka began as a translator and a scout for publishers in Poland. As an agent, she said, you also have to be a lawyer, an accountant and an editor. So there are some big differences between being an agent and a translator. “Being a translator is a very lonely profession. Being an agent you have to be with people, you have to travel.”

The packed sessions at the London Book Fair’s 16-year-old Literary Translation Center are confirmation that literary translators are always seeking new ways to improve their situation. But the issue that remains a constant for literary translators today: despite being an extremely labor-intensive profession, the panelists noted, most can’t earn a living merely from translation.