How Not to Get Lost in Translation

In the fall of 2021, the American writer and translator Jennifer Croft published an essay in The Guardian that provoked a spirited conversation within the English-speaking literary world. Why, she asked, were translators expected to remain coyly, politely invisible, with their names more often than not cast off from book covers by publishers? This practice, she pointed out, overlooks the labor that goes into these books: It is the translators, after all, who “choose every word they will contain.”