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Could You Make Money As A Translator?
If you speak a second language, it could put cash in your pocket, and here’s how much you could earn
In the late 1990s, I was on the board of the National Book Critics Circle, which gives annual awards that didn’t then include a prize for a translated book. This omission bothered some members, who talked about it at meetings. Their argument went something like this:
“We all know how important translators are. They can make or break a book written in another language. Why aren’t we honoring their contributions?”
Members listened, and in 2022, the NBCC created the annual Gregg Barrios Book Translation Prize, named for the Latino poet and critic and influential member of the organization.
In recent years, other groups have taken similar steps. The National Book Awards launched a prize for a translated book in 2018. Two years earlier the International Booker Prize had begun giving £50,000 prize for a translated fiction, shared equally by the author and translator. In Britain, the Society of Authors alone awards more than a half dozen such awards. And in the U.S., a recent article in the Authors Guild Bulletin called translation “one of our most cherished and undervalued art forms.”