So you’ve acquired the best novel to come out of Darkest Peru in the last century. How do you find a translator? I’ve spent a lot of time this week thinking about translators this week, so I thought I’d write a quick note on the subject.

Some translators find themselves by bringing you the project in the first place (see my blog of 29 June on how Saramago came to be published by Harvill). Of course, an editor may find themselves in the awkward position of be alerted to a book by a translator who just isn’t right for the job. Fortunately that doesn’t happen very often. If a translator with a good track record feels sufficiently passionate about a novel to persuade a publisher to acquire the rights, the chances are he or she is the right person to translate it. It is important that a translator really likes the text they are to translate. After all, they have to live with it for at least a few months, if not a year – or longer depending on the length of the book. Translators have frequently turned down my offers of work because they just don’t feel a sympathy for the book I’m proposing. As one translator wrote to me today: ‘It sings in a key that is well out of my range.’

So it goes. You think you know exactly the right translator and they turn you down because they don’t get on with the book, or because they are too busy. Whilst the former excuse is disappointing but reasonable (the chances are that if a translator doesn’t like something, they won’t translate it well anyway), the latter is downright tantalising. To feel so close to getting the perfect translator, and yet so far! It’s frustrating. Solutions can be found: the subtle art of persuasion (‘I’m sure you can find the time!’) or the suggestion that the translator collaborates with someone else to speed up the process (although this will only be acceptable if the translator already has a very good working relationship with another translator and enjoys collaboration).

If your first, second and third choice of translator all turn you down, then you’re in trouble. The fact that the number of translated books published in the UK is relatively small means that there is a fairly small pool of tried and tested literary translators, even for languages as common as French. When you start looking for translators from Chinese, the pool becomes a puddle. Now, if you were looking for a translator from English into Italian you’d be spoilt for choice. I spoke to one English-to-Italian translator who told me how many Euros per 1000 words he got paid for a project. The figure was very low. And UK translators complain that British publishers don’t pay them a living wage! I’m sympathetic. It’s hard, but they should try working for Italian publishers in a country where many people have learned English and many English books are translated: the competition is fierce.

Not so in Britain. If British publishers acquire between them more than five Chinese novels per year, things start to get very strained. Luckily, excellent projects like www.paper-republic.org exist to put translators and publishers in touch. And the Paper Republic people have also started a Google group where they mail out news of Chinese-to-English projects (film subtitles, books, articles etc) that are in need of translators. This may well mean that a person who translates, say, computer games, gets to hear about a novel that needs translating, pitches for the job by writing a sample translation and gets it, thus gaining invaluable experience and helping the puddle become a pool.

Despite such initiatives, it’s hard for would-be fiction translators to get their name on the list of ‘people to be approached’. It’s a catch twenty-two:  publishers don’t want to entrust a novel to someone who hasn’t translated one before; but you can’t get a novel translation published until a publisher commissions you. Occasionally, though, a publisher decides to take a risk. I did this with Sandra Smith when I commissioned her to translate Irène Némirovsky’s Suite Française. Sandra, an academic teaching French at Cambridge University, contacted me because she wanted to translate a short text by Camus, just at the time I was looking for a translator for the Némirovsky. Although she translated fiction all the time for her job, she had never published a fiction translation. Nevertheless, I was intrigued by her passion for the Camus text. Since I had asked a number of people to do sample translations of a chapter from Suite Française, I thought it would be interesting to ask Sandra to do one too. In the end, I liked her sample best, commissioned her and she has gone to garner great praise for her Némirovsky translations, and to  gain a considerable reputation as a literary translator. A very happy accident, and probably one that makes all those translators who have tirelessly sent their CVs to publishers without result grind their teeth. The truth is, there needs to be a spark of sympathy, not only between the translator and the book, but between the translator and the editor. It’s hard to commission a translation from someone of whom you have no knowledge. You both have to trust each other to do a good job, and you have to like and esteem each other. Otherwise it doesn’t work.

Of course, all this assumes that the author agrees with the editor’s choice of translator. But that’s another story …

This month’s featured book is Meira Chand’s excellent novel about Singapore, A Different Sky. Written in English it is nevertheless about a country that was, and still is, a tower of Babel. Set between the twenties and fifties, when Singapore endured rule by the British, occupation by the Japanese and then social upheaval as is clawed its way towards independence, it raises the fascinating question of how you create a sense of belonging when every inhabitant comes from somewhere else. In our ‘Armchair Traveller’ feature this week, Meira writes about why Singaporeans are only just starting to read fiction. Forget ‘how do you find a translator?’ This is about how you create a national literature!