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thelinguist.uberflip.com AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2016 The Linguist 15 FICTION IN TRANSLATION no obligation to publish it and keep it in the marketplace. "Our goal is to defend and protect translators. Amazon is a big international firm that is coming into Europe with very Anglo-American views. The contracts they proposed in Europe are copyright inspired; Anglo-American copyright law as opposed to continental authors' rights law," says Cécile Deniard, Vice-President of ATLF. Although she admits that this system, whereby the producer, rather than the author, of the work is at the centre of the process, is one that translators in Europe are having to get used to. While she says there is a good working relationship between the imprint and translators, her advice is: "You can work for Amazon, but you have to know that it is a part of a big machine." Dominic Myers, from Amazon Publishing EU, says translators can negotiate a per-word fee or a combination of fee and royalties from the first book sold. "By giving translators the opportunity to earn ongoing royalties based on the sales of the translated work, we believe we are offering a sustainable long- term financial model for translators," adding that it does now revert the translator's rights "in the event that we no longer have publication rights in the underlying work". Literary translator Ros Schwartz adds: "At first everybody was extremely cynical but AmazonCrossing have shown a willingness to meet us and talk to us. I think the feeling is that they are providing work for quite a lot of translators, especially people who are starting out. I think quite a lot of us feel they are a reality, they exist, we should try to find a way to work with them and not sell our souls." Out of the ghetto The imprint's move away from solely high- minded works is considered a good move for translators, and not just because it will provide more work for them. "I think there is a sense that, if it is in translation, it is going to be very literary and probably rather difficult. If [AmazonCrossing] are getting good translations of 'middlebrow' novels, I think that is a good thing because it gets people used to the idea you can read a novel, it doesn't matter what language it was written in," adds Schwartz, who is also Vice-Chair of the UK Translators Association of the Society of Authors. "It is quite useful not to see translations in a sort of ghetto." AmazonCrossing has launched a website where people in the industry, including authors, agents, translators and publishers, can suggest new books. Its approach has made an undeniable impact on the market. It published almost 14% of all works in translation last year – three times more than the next biggest publisher of fiction in translation, Dalkey Archive, according to the University of Rochester's Three Percent blog. Antonia Lloyd-Jones is a translator from Polish who worked with the imprint on Zygmunt Miloszewski's crime novel Rage, due for release in August. She had the advantage that the author insisted on her as translator, and the fee had already been negotiated by an agent. It is the first Polish book to be published by the imprint. "Amazon has a different approach from most publishers of translated fiction, offering a lower fee but a higher royalty rate. It is not an advance against royalties but a fee plus royalties," says Lloyd-Jones. "I'm now going to translate a second book for them and am prepared to take a gamble on a lower fee with a higher royalty, as potentially a way of earning more than I would with the traditional payment structure." She was involved in the editorial process at every stage, first working with a freelance editor, then a copy editor and finally a proof reader, and had the last word on the final text. "The author and I have felt included at every stage. Working with AmazonCrossing has been efficient and professional and, so far, I'm very pleased. They know it is in their interest to be good to us and we are clearly important to them. They are interested in quality and knowing what we have to say," she adds. The consensus appears to be that AmazonCrossing has the benefit of being big enough to bring new authors through without recourse to grants and young enough to have a 'can-do' attitude. David Bellos was the first Man Booker International Prize winner for translation in 2005, for his work on the novels of the Albanian author Ismail Kadare. He says the presence of AmazonCrossing will mean a rise in genre fiction from other languages and subsequently an increased circulation of books of all types across borders. "It means English language readers will have more access to books written in the rest of the world, which has a kind of 'dedramatising' effect on the idea of being a translated book." While some may doubt the benefit of having, say, more Norwegian crime thrillers, he does say Amazon will mean more work for translators, for whom genre fiction is always valuable. "The skills that you develop and hone translating perfectly ordinary books are actually the same as the ones you need to translate more difficult books. From the point of view of translation, translating Proust isn't actually any more difficult than translating Simenon. All questions of indeterminacy of meaning, of cultural transposition, of syntactic rearrangement – these arise whether you are translating great stuff or not so great stuff," he said. AmazonCrossing's growing presence could mean the often quoted figure of translated works comprising just 3% of the market may soon have to be revised upwards. The move away from high-minded works is considered a good move for translators BY THE BOOK Orhan Pamuk, one of the most successful writers in English translation (published by Faber) (right); and the London Book Fair 2016 (above) © SHUTTERSTOCK