Translators

A literary translator turns a finished book in one language into a finished book in another. People arrive here with a manuscript, a foreign rights deal or a favourite novel they want to read in English, and they need book translation services from someone who reads the whole work, not a machine.

The listings below are translators and translation practices, each working from specific languages into English.

The tags split the listings by where the translator works and, more usefully, by which language pair and market a book is aimed at. United States, United Kingdom, Australia and Canada each gather translators whose working life sits inside that publishing culture: the contracts they sign, the rights they handle, the English they produce. Esther Allen and Jonathan Kaplansky sit in the North American branch, where a literary translator often works from Spanish or French into the English a US or Canadian house will print. Stephanie Smee and Charlotte Coombe belong to the UK and Australian side, and both bring European fiction into English for readers there. Rafa Lombardino covers Spanish and Portuguese, which matters if your book began in Latin America. Zhuk Translation, the work of Lilit Žekulin Thwaites, handles Russian, a pairing few others in this group offer.

Pick the branch that matches your source language and your target readership, not the one with the longest list. A translator working into British English will render dialogue, spelling and idiom for a UK reader; the same manuscript placed with a US translator comes back in a different register. If you need book translation services for a novel, a memoir or a collection of essays, the tag tells you which market the finished English is built for.