First institute of translation to open in Russia
Russia is creating its first Institute of Translation, and it will specialise in literature. The plan was reported by the Culture television channel, citing ITAR-TASS, and it amounts to an admission that the state has spent years neglecting the people who carry books across languages.
Vladimir Grigoriev, Deputy Head of Rospechat, the federal press and mass communications agency, put it bluntly: Russian translators have not received enough support from the government. There is, he said, a functional vacuum, and the new institution is being founded to fill it.
Not a school
The most useful thing Grigoriev said was about what the Institute will not be. "The Institute will not be a school-like organization, but an organization that will provide grants to various projects, hold conferences for interpreters and provide other activities," he explained.
That distinction matters more than it sounds. Russia already has universities producing translators. What it has lacked is a body that funds the work after graduation, when a translator faces two years alone with a difficult novel and no way to pay rent while doing it. Grants, not seminars, are what get books finished.
Grigoriev also identified the coordination gap. Various programmes and foundations to support the translation industry already exist, he noted, but none of them had taken on the job of coordinating the activity. The money was scattered. Nobody was steering.
Why the state cares about novels
Alexander Avdeev, then Minister of Culture, framed the case in cultural terms rather than commercial ones. Institutions that assist translators in their hard work are necessary, he argued, because the fate of a nation's acquaintance with world culture depends on translators.
He is describing a two-way door. Russians read literary translation to reach Faulkner, Marquez and Murakami. Everyone else reads it to reach Tolstoy and Chekhov. Cut the translators out and both directions close at once, leaving a large literature talking mainly to itself.
The economics that broke the profession
Literary translation is the worst-paid serious work in publishing, and the reasons are structural rather than accidental:
- Rates are typically per page or per sheet, and a demanding page can take an hour or a week
- Royalties are rare, so a translator who makes a book a hit sees none of it
- Credit is thin, and the name often does not reach the cover
- The work is slow by nature, and nobody funds the waiting
The result is predictable. Talented people translate one book, discover they cannot live on it, and move into commercial work where a technical manual pays more per hour than a masterpiece. Grigoriev's grants are aimed directly at that leak. Pay a literary translator enough to finish the book and the book gets finished.
What Russia is copying
The model is not original, which is a point in its favour. Similar bodies exist across Europe and have done the same job for decades. They subsidise translators, fund publishers who take a risk on a foreign title, run residencies where translators work near the writers they are rendering, and put money behind the promotion of national literature abroad. The Netherlands, Norway and Poland have all used exactly this machinery to get their writers onto English-language shelves far out of proportion to the size of their populations.
Russia arrived at the idea late, with an enormous literary back catalogue and a serious deficit of new voices reaching foreign readers. The commercial market for russian translation is substantial, but it runs on contracts, immigration paperwork and business documents. Almost none of that money finds its way to fiction.
The retranslation problem
There is a specific job waiting for this Institute. Much of Russian literature reaches English-language readers through translations made a century ago, in prose that flattens very different writers into a single genteel register. Constance Garnett's versions of Dostoevsky and Chekhov shaped how generations of readers heard those authors, and the debate over how much they smoothed away has never really stopped.
Retranslation is expensive and unglamorous. Publishers dislike paying twice for a book they already own. It is precisely the kind of work that only happens when an outside body writes a cheque, which is what a grant-giving institute is for.
Three percent, and falling
The scale of the imbalance is easy to miss from inside a large literature. English-language publishing translates a famously small share of what it prints, a figure long estimated at around three percent of all titles, and that slice is fought over by every language on earth. A Russian novelist competes for it with a Korean novelist, a Hungarian poet and an Argentine essayist, and the ones who win are usually the ones whose home country paid for a sample translation, flew a translator to a book fair and covered the publisher's risk. That is the machinery world literature actually runs on, and it is bought rather than earned.
Reading in both directions
The hardest part of the job is not vocabulary. It is what does not carry across at all: idiom, register, humour, the words that name feelings one culture has bothered to name and another has not. Anyone who has looked at a list of untranslatable words has seen the problem in miniature, and a translator working on a novel meets some version of it on every page, then has to choose and move on.
That is the "hard work" Avdeev referred to, and it is why an institute makes sense where a subsidy alone would not. Conferences let translators argue about these choices with each other. Grants let them take the time to make the choices properly.
Whether the Institute delivers depends on whether the money reaches translators rather than administrators. But the diagnosis was correct: the vacuum was real, and someone finally named it.