Giving Translators Their Due

Jennifer Croft and Polish author Olga Tokarczuk shared the 2018 Man Booker International Prize—now known as the International Booker Prize—for the novel , Croft’s name was not on the cover of the U.K. edition, published by Fitzcarraldo, nor the American edition from Riverhead. Such an omission was and is not uncommon in the world of literary translation, but the practice has recently come under scrutiny as a symptom of broader undervaluation of translators’ work. In September, Croft published an op-ed in the titled “Why translators should be named on book covers,” in which she argued that despite recent improvements in the treatment of translators—since 2016, for instance, the prize money for the International Booker has been evenly split between the author and the translator—there is still much to be done to ensure that