International Translation Day is observed every September 30. The date is the feast day of St. Jerome, the fourth-century scholar who translated the Bible into Latin and is treated as the patron saint of translators. The International Federation of Translators has promoted the day since the federation was founded in 1953, and in 2017 the United Nations General Assembly recognized it formally.
The day honors a profession most readers never notice. Anyone who has read Tolstoy, Homer, García Márquez or Han Kang in English has read a translator’s sentences, and most of them couldn’t name the translator.
That invisibility is the interesting part for a writer. It’s the same condition I work under.
What did St. Jerome do to become the patron of translators?
Jerome was born around 342 to 347 in Stridon and died on September 30, 420, in Bethlehem. Pope Damasus I commissioned the Latin Bible translation that became the Vulgate. Jerome began in 382 by correcting the existing Latin Gospels, and by 390 he’d started translating the Hebrew scriptures directly from the Hebrew. He finished by 405.
That choice made him enemies. Most Christians of his time, Augustine among them, regarded the Greek Septuagint as inspired and expected any Latin version of the Jewish scriptures to be made from it. Jerome went back to the older source because he thought the translation should rest on the original, and he took a great deal of criticism for it. His version became the standard Latin Bible of the Western church for more than a thousand years. A translator who insists on going back to the source is still the one worth hiring.
Every serious translation since has faced his problem. Fidelity to the original and readability in the new language pull against each other. The translator picks the winner one sentence at a time.
When did the UN recognize International Translation Day?
In 2017. The General Assembly passed resolution 71/288, declaring September 30 International Translation Day to recognize the work of language professionals.
The International Federation of Translators had been celebrating it for decades by then, and it picks a theme each year. The 2025 theme was Translation, shaping a future you can trust, a pointed choice in a year when machine translation was everywhere.
Why are translators called invisible authors?
Because the better they do the job, the less a reader notices them.
Lawrence Venuti built a book around the idea, The Translator’s Invisibility, published in 1995. His argument was that English-language publishing praises a translation for reading as if it had been written in English to begin with. That standard erases the translator. A reader who finishes a translated novel thinking about the author’s style is admiring decisions the author never made. The rhythm, the word choice and the jokes that land were built by somebody whose name sits in small type on the title page, if it appears at all.
Translators write every word of the book their readers hold. That’s authorship by any honest measure, and the industry has spent a long time pretending otherwise.
Who was Constance Garnett, and why did Brodsky complain about her?
Constance Garnett translated 71 volumes of Russian literature into English. Her Anna Karenina appeared in 1901 and her War and Peace in 1904, and she went on through Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Turgenev and Gogol. By the late 1920s she was frail and half-blind, still working. For two generations of English readers, Russian literature meant her sentences.
She worked fast and smoothed over difficult passages for readability, especially in Dostoevsky. Nabokov called her translations dry, flat and unbearably demure. Joseph Brodsky complained that English readers couldn’t tell Tolstoy from Dostoevsky because they weren’t reading the prose of either one. They were reading Constance Garnett.
Brodsky meant it as an insult. It’s also the strongest proof of authorship anyone could offer.
If two of the most distinct novelists in history sound alike in English, the voice readers are hearing belongs to the translator. That’s the risk of the job in its plainest form. A translator with a strong, consistent voice produces readable books that all sound the same. A translator who disappears into each author produces better books and gets no credit for the range. Garnett’s defenders point out that she introduced millions of readers to writers they’d otherwise never have read. That outweighs the complaints.
Why did García Márquez wait three years for Gregory Rabassa?
Because Julio Cortázar told him to.
Rabassa had translated Cortázar’s Hopscotch and shared the first U.S. National Book Award for Translation for it. When García Márquez wanted One Hundred Years of Solitude in English, Cortázar advised him to wait for Rabassa, and he waited three years until Rabassa had room in his schedule. García Márquez later judged the English version better than his Spanish original.
Authors almost never say that. It shows where the writing in a translated book happens. Rabassa’s 2005 memoir took its title from the old Italian pun that equates the translator with a traitor: If This Be Treason. He died in 2016 at ninety-four.
Translators write every word of the book their readers hold. That is authorship by any honest measure, and the industry has spent a long time pretending otherwise.Share on X
How is a translator like a ghostwriter?
Closely enough that I recognize the job.
A ghostwriter writes a book in someone else’s voice, and the client’s name goes on the cover. A translator writes a book in someone else’s voice in a different language, and the author’s name goes on the cover. In both cases the reader thinks they’re hearing one person and is hearing two. Both jobs demand the same skill: absorb another person’s way of thinking well enough to produce sentences they’d recognize as their own. I’ve written about how that works on my side in capturing the client’s voice.
The differences are real. A translator starts from a finished text, and a ghostwriter starts from interviews, notes and a client who knows the story and can’t get it onto the page. The translator’s source is fixed. A ghostwriter’s source talks back, changes its mind and remembers new things halfway through a draft.
The credit question also runs differently. A ghostwriter agrees to stay invisible as part of the deal, and the arrangement is honest because both parties chose it. I’ve laid out how that works in whether ghostwriters get credit. Translators have historically been made invisible by convention, without agreeing to anything, and a growing number of them have stopped accepting it.
Should a translator’s name go on the book cover?
Jennifer Croft, who translates from Polish and Spanish and translated Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights, announced in August 2021 that she wouldn’t translate any more books without her name on the cover. On September 30 of that year, International Translation Day, she and the novelist Mark Haddon published an open letter on the website of the U.K.’s Society of Authors, launching the #TranslatorsOnTheCover campaign. About 1,800 writers and translators signed within weeks, Tokarczuk and Jhumpa Lahiri among them.
Prize committees moved first. When Han Kang’s The Vegetarian won the Man Booker International Prize in 2016, the £50,000 award was split evenly between Han and her translator, Deborah Smith. Smith had decided to teach herself Korean at twenty-two and had been learning it for only three years when she started the translation.
The cover should say who wrote the words. In a translated book, two people did.
A ghostwritten book is a different case only because the client is paying for the name, and both sides sign up for that. Nobody signed a translator up for anonymity. Publishers inherited the habit and kept it because it was cheaper and tidier.
Can machine translation replace a literary translator?
Not for a book anyone cares about.
Machine translation is good at the literal layer of a sentence and getting better every year. A literary translator’s job sits above that layer. Puns, rhythm, register, a character who speaks formally to hide fear, a joke that depends on a word with two meanings in the original and none in English: each of those needs a decision, and the decision depends on understanding what the author was doing and why. Software produces a plausible sentence. A translator produces the sentence the author would have written in English, and those are different targets.
The same split runs through ghostwriting. A tool can generate text in a general voice. To match one person’s voice, with their habits, their humor and the stories only they know, you need a human who has sat and listened to them.
How should you mark International Translation Day?
Read something in translation and look up the translator before you start. Read a few pages of a second translation of the same book if one exists, and notice how far apart two honest versions land. If you’re choosing an older text, the translation matters as much as the author, and I’ve written about that in picking the right translation of Josephus.
If you’re an author thinking about taking your own book into another language, start with whether you should translate your book, and budget for a human translator who’ll put real craft into it. Machine output is a draft at best.
And if you write for other people, as I do, take the day as a reminder of the company you keep. For more on the invisible side of the trade, see the ghostwriting hub and the full calendar of literature related holidays.