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Executive summary
6 Executive summary
Introduction
Europe owes its cultural richness to its multilingualism and cultural and linguistic diversity. Translation plays an essential role in sharing this richness and making it accessible across the continent and beyond; it acts as the cornerstone of the EU’s motto, ‘united in diversity’. Through translation, ideas and creations can be disseminated across Europe, adding to Europe’s cultural diversity and contributing to a stronger shared knowledge among Europeans. From an economic perspective, translation is the only means by which European cultural and creative works, including books, films and plays, can traverse linguistic borders and find larger audiences and markets across Europe and around the world.
However, the translation profession has become unattractive in the creative and cultural sector, mainly due to poor remuneration and working conditions. This represents a threat to the number and diversity of language combinations covered by European translators. In addition, the market for translated works, with the exception of books translated from English, is a niche market with a fragile economy, particularly for lesser-used languages; publishers find it difficult to pay what translators would consider appropriate rates enabling them to make a living from their profession. At the same time, public policies at national and European levels have put in place funding mechanisms to promote diversity and increase the number of works that cross borders.
The challenge faced by the sector is therefore to introduce fairer and better working conditions for translators while ensuring that European cultural works circulate easily in Europe.
With this in mind, an Open Method of Coordination (OMC) group, composed of experts from various Member States, was mandated by the Council of the European Union to assess existing support mechanisms for translation, discuss best practice and provide concrete recommendations on:
1. how the situation in the translation sector can be improved;
2. how public funding can help to improve the circulation of translated books across Europe.
This report is the output of that group. The report has a particular focus on literary translation but also includes recommendations for the audiovisual and theatre sectors.
The recommendations in this report are for the most part aimed at policymakers at local, regional, national and EU levels, as well as public funding agencies supporting literary translation across Europe. However, in order to have the greatest possible impact, it is intended that the report should reach all stakeholders in the book value chain across Europe. The recommendations concerning training and education are also relevant to educational and academic institutions.
Europe is facing a decline in the number and diversity of tertiary-level language degrees on offer, coupled with a reduction in students enrolling in language studies, particularly for lesser-used languages. This trend threatens to affect the quality and diversity of translators available across Europe.
INITIAL EDUCATION – BUILDING CULTURAL AND LINGUISTIC AWARENESS AND WIDENING THE OPPORTUNITIES FOR FUTURE LITERARY TRANSLATORS
In order to attract talent to the field of literary translation in the future, it is necessary to invest in early-stage education in order to develop vocational passion for the profession, and to build intrinsically valuable skills.
THE OMC GROUP HAS THE FOLLOWING RECOMMENDATIONS
Children should be exposed to other languages at an early stage in their schooling, and the diversity of languages and cultures should be valued and fully exploited in the classroom, to sensitise them to the rich diversity of languages and cultures of Europe.
The practice of translation should be reintroduced in language teaching, both for its intrinsic value to language learning, and to promote the practice itself.
The ongoing decline in the range of languages on offer at university level across Europe needs to be urgently addressed if we are to continue to produce expert literary translators. This is especially the case for unusual language pairs.
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The mobility of students and collaboration between universities should be reinforced, in order to guarantee a large cohort of graduates with a diverse range of language and cultural skills.
Translators’ career opportunities during and after language studies should be made more visible, and the profession of translator and its multiple domains should be promoted.
Students at Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts levels should be exposed to a variety of disciplines beyond linguistic study, such as machine translation and entrepreneurship, and links between universities and the professional sectors should be encouraged.
CONTINUOUS TRAINING – PROVIDING EMERGING AND ESTABLISHED TRANSLATORS WITH OPPORTUNITIES TO TRAIN THROUGHOUT THEIR CAREERS
Another challenge that all translators face, both when launching their careers and as they build their practice, is finding opportunities to develop their skills.
THE OMC GROUP HAS THE FOLLOWING RECOMMENDATIONS
Publishers have limited capacity to offer on-the-job training, and should be supported.
Opportunities and organisations for continuous training should be reinforced with a strong European dimension. This includes further support for mentorship programmes organised through national/regional institutions or funding agencies, increased efforts to expand the possibilities and subsidies for translators in residence across Europe, and providing literary translators with access to mobility grants and individual scholarships.
Collaboration between organisations offering continuous training and universities should be encouraged.
THE PRECARIOUS STATUS OF LITERARY TRANSLATORS – A THREAT TO THE APPEAL OF THE PROFESSION AND THE SUSTAINABILITY OF THE LITERARY TRANSLATION SECTOR
Factors that seriously affect the attractiveness of literary translation as a profession are poor working conditions and low remuneration, which prohibit translators from being able to make a living from their profession. As the market for translated works is a niche one, market conditions do not allow publishers to easily increase fees without financial support, and translators report that contracts do not always
accord with copyright law. National translators’ associations can help establish a more transparent market where translators are aware of their rights and of the general working conditions in the sector, and the directive on copyright in the digital single market (DSM directive) provides a good framework to bring the various interested parties (writers, translators, publishers) to the table. However, translators, who are often self-employed, are not yet able to engage in collective bargaining for better rates due to EU competition law and are pleading for socially legitimate exceptions to competition law restrictions currently under review by the European Commission.
THE OMC GROUP HAS THE FOLLOWING RECOMMENDATIONS
The DSM directive should be transposed into law in all EU
Member States to improve the situation on fair remuneration and transparency.
EU and national funding organisations should encourage good practice with regard to remuneration and fair contracts.
Collective bargaining should be allowed and encouraged for literary translators.
Translators’ associations should be reinforced.
Translators should have access to individual scholarships/grants at national and international level.
THE SPECIFICITIES OF TRANSLATING FOR THE AUDIO-VISUAL AND THEATRE SECTOR
In the audiovisual sector, a shortage of translators, unattractive working conditions and use of machine translation are threatening the quality of subtitles and dubbing. In the theatre sector, where the practice of surtitling performances has only more recently been widely adopted, the profession is less organised.
THE OMC GROUP HAS THE FOLLOWING RECOMMENDATIONS
The quality of audiovisual translation should be monitored and translators’ poor working conditions should be addressed.
High-quality audiovisual translation should be a requirement for all European audiovisual productions and professional translators must play a crucial role in any application of crowdsourcing or AI to audiovisual translation.
The sector of translation for the performing arts needs to be better structured.
10 MACHINE AND RELAY TRANSLATION – PRACTICES AFFECTING QUALITY OF TRANSLATION
New technologies such as machine translation, along with other practices including relay translation, could be seen as solutions that could compensate for a lack of translators, particularly in rare combinations of languages. However, the output seen so far is of a quality not deemed acceptable by both academic research as well as publishers.
THE OMC GROUP HAS THE FOLLOWING RECOMMENDATIONS
Even though machine translation is still unsuitable for translating literature, progress in technology should be monitored closely.
Relay translation should not be encouraged as a long-term solution to promote the dissemination of works in lesser-used languages in Europe.
VISIBILITY AND INCLUSION
Visibility can lead to better recognition, and help translators overcome the issues arising from anonymity. Authors and publishers have much to gain by involving translators in promoting books to publishers and to the audience.
Another key issue in the translation sector is the lack of diversity, particularly with regard to ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, ability, age, and religious and cultural background.
THE OMC GROUP HAS THE FOLLOWING RECOMMENDATIONS
Continuous and collective efforts are required in order to bring more diversity into the profession of literary translation.
Databases of translators should be developed in countries and regions where they do not yet exist, and these should be kept up to date.
Translators should be acknowledged and promoted as crucial mediators and ambassadors between cultures and languages.
2 | How public funding can help to improve the circulation of translated books across Europe
The growth and development of the translated literature market also faces a number of hurdles. The current European literature market is not as multilingual as one would hope. Instead, national markets are dominated by domestic literature and translated Anglo-American books. This results in a lack of linguistic and cultural diversity in the European literature scene.
Many publishers are striving to combat this lack of diversity, but in doing so they often take on financial risk due to the uncertainty of the market for translated works. Therefore, public funding is needed at national and European levels to help mitigate this risk and enable the diverse literary scenes within Europe to cross borders and gain visibility. Without adequate funding, publishers are also less able to offer fair remuneration to translators.
NATIONAL GRANT SUPPORT TO PUBLISHERS – WHAT MAKES THEM ATTRACTIVE AND EFFICIENT?
These funding systems need to develop and adapt to meet the complex needs of the market, and should include support not just for translation costs but also for production and promotion costs. However, a key issue faced across the sector is that there is no robust, harmonised system of data collection on the circulation of books in Europe, making it difficult to measure the efficiency of public funding and to direct European policy for the sector in the most effective manner.
THE OMC GROUP HAS THE FOLLOWING RECOMMENDATIONS
National translation foundations/agencies should be established on a statutory basis and adequately resourced with permanent expert personnel.
Grant systems should be transparent, accessible and non-bureaucratic.
The level of co-funding awarded should be of sufficient value to achieve meaningful impact.Grant systems should be predictable and have a long-term perspective.
Grants should encourage and enable publishers to provide fair remuneration for translators in a transparent manner.
Support to publishers should cover not only translation but also promotion and production costs.
A robust system of data collection and statistics on the circulation of books in Europe and the world should be developed and implemented.
Direct financial support to publishers is essential to cover the additional translation and promotion costs linked to the publication of translated works. However, public support can help the book sector in many other ways, such as building international networking and reinforcing foreign rights sales and promotion capacities.
THE OMC GROUP HAS THE FOLLOWING RECOMMENDATIONS
Public support should also invest in networking, in order to build close relationships and trust between publishers for a more efficient translation market.
The post-COVID-19 evolution of international book fairs should be accompanied by public support.
Support to agents and foreign rights departments should be increased, for instance through capacity building and training activities and by contributing to international marketing expenses, in order to improve international sales capacity.
The role of public agencies in promoting books in international markets should be encouraged, including through multi-country joint approaches.
PUBLIC SUPPORT FOR CULTURAL AND LINGUISTIC DIVERSITY AND RECIPROCITY
Increasing the circulation of books is a two-way street. Export strategy, whereby national public support ‘pushes’ a country’s books to foreign territories, should be coupled with an import strategy, whereby additional money is set aside to facilitate inbound translation, and to promote and encourage the reading of foreign literature.
THE OMC GROUP HAS THE FOLLOWING RECOMMENDATIONS
National support to inbound translation should be encouraged, in addition to the more common support offered to foreign publishers to publish domestic titles abroad.
The European dimension of literacy and reading promotion policies should be increased.
In an environment that is increasingly dominated by online stores, the special role of brick-and-mortar bookshops in promoting diversity should be actively supported.
REGIONAL AND EUROPEAN COOPERATION
Regional or multi-country cooperation initiatives complement and enhance national support systems. Cooperation can have a profound and long-term effect: it is a good way for partner organisations and professionals to deepen relationships, gain a better understanding of different markets and practices, and learn from each other. It is the most effective way to overcome the transnational barriers that hamper the circulation of works in Europe.
THE OMC GROUP HAS THE FOLLOWING RECOMMENDATIONS
Regional and European cooperation should be reinforced though multi-country translation grant systems (‘common pots’); multi-country collective stands, or joint guests of honour programmes, at book fairs; organisation of workshops, networking events and training for authors, translators, editors, foreign rights department staff and agents; and sharing knowledge and good practices.
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Overall conclusions
The objective of increasing the circulation of works in Europe can be achieved only in combination with a strong and diverse translation sector. This will require making the working and remuneration conditions of translators more attractive, reinforcing translators’ associations, and ensuring better recognition of the contribution of translators to European and cultural diversity.
If we are to safeguard the EU’s multilingual, multicultural heritage, we also need to provide incentives for the book market (publishers, booksellers, translation funding organisations and bodies) to be
sustainable and for copyright owners (writers, illustrators, translators) to provide it with content.
A good support system should be holistic and cover the entire value chain. It should be open and encourage cooperation and reciprocity.
A higher level of public funding – in addition to the recent public spending efforts to tackle the effects of the COVID-19 crisis – is also necessary to achieve both cultural diversity and fairer remuneration at European level.
Dialogue between writers, translators and publishers should be pursued at European and national levels beyond this OMC group. Discussions should aim, for instance, to speed up the transposition of the DSM directive and the application of its key principles: fair remuneration, fair contractual practices, and transparency, to harmonise funding practices in Europe and develop cooperation.
The challenge faced by the sector is therefore to introduce fairer and better working conditions for translators while ensuring that European cultural works circulate easily in Europe.
