Translator Beware: On the Myth of the Finicky English Reader

When I started my career as a professional literary translator, I began coming up against a mysterious “English reader” whom academics and editors kept referring to when they looked over my work, leaving comments like, “the English reader will find this line awkward” or “I understand, but we need to make things more accessible to the English reader” and so on.

This was very puzzling; I am an English reader, I’ve been reading English the whole of my reading life. I have a master’s degree in Victorian poetry from a prestigious university and worked professionally for years in literary translation, which means, frankly, I tend to be more normative in my English usage, if anything. Look at this paragraph, for example; I sound practically archaic.

But I kept coming up against this hypothetical English reader, and not just in terms of language. When acquiring editors invoked the English reader, they would say things like, “English readers won’t go for that sort of thing” or “English readers don’t like short story collections.”

But who was this English reader, and why did he hold so much sway over my practice? He (he seems to be a he) is actually a minority in the reading world, but everyone in publishing defers to him. Women read more than men, and translated fiction outsells English fiction in the UK, but the Mythical English Reader won’t read women writers or non- European translations (which begs the question: Then why should I care about him?!). He is incredibly finicky, in a way that suggests people have been indulging him all his life instead of challenging him or encouraging him to try new and different things. What he likes seems to be other white men and whatever other white men produce; if he reads translated literature, he might read an obscure dead white male from Germany or Italy, or even some author from a non-European country if at least the translator is white. He likes very few things and hates an awful lot of others.

He likes very few things and hates an awful lot of others.

Over the years, I would constantly be nudged or told outright to write like “the English reader,” to think like “the English reader,” to like the things he likes and disdain the things he disdains, to make the world comfortable for him, my sentences and content easier for him. And soon, this constant presence of outside voices seeped into my inside voice until I found myself automatically trying to fit into the Mythical English Reader’s ideas of what my work should look like.

It was a long time before I realized that the problem wasn’t my flawless English or the amazing books I tended to pick to translate; saying, “the English reader won’t like this,” really just meant, “You’re not white.” Proper English wasn’t proper because it followed a set of rules per se, proper English was proper because that was the way white people spoke, and whatever I said was incorrect by default until it was approved by a white person. While this revelation came as something of a shock, perhaps it isn’t so surprising to you.

If you’re a person of color reading this essay in English right now, chances are you grew up under the pervasive and ubiquitous gaze of the Mythical English Reader and understand it very well. I didn’t grow up like that, or at least, not to any meaningful extent. I grew up mostly in Korea, have lived my entire adult life so far in Korea, and even when I wasn’t living in Korea, I was mostly living in Asia. Throughout my life I couldn’t care less what white people thought because white people had nothing to do with the grades I got in school, what my clients paid me, the men I dated, or what I thought of myself. Then I fell into this “literary translator” job and suddenly I had to figure out exactly what white people thought—and fast.

They are truly a different people from us Koreans. First of all, as far as I can tell, “white people” seem to be a colonial invention, an identity that almost only appears when they go up against brown-skinned people in their conquests and exploitation. In America, while there are still people there who talk about being Italian or Irish etc., white people are for the most part a very distinctive and cohesive monolith who are mostly defined by the fact that they are Not Brown. It was historically important that they were white because being not-white meant being a target of Indigenous genocide, a slave in the chattel slavery system, or a second-class brown person who was treated differently from a white person who does the same job and pays the same taxes and dues.

I say “historical,” but all the above systems continue to be perpetuated in America in some form today (for example, just look at who does most of the forced labor in the US prison-industrial complex). Whiteness craves power and money and is unwilling to concede that power and money to non-whites. Sometimes, it will throw a bone to a few brown people when it looks like they’re going to stage a revolution—aficionados refer to this as “tokenism”—but for the most part, whiteness will bend over backwards trying to keep people of color in line.

Given that such white supremacy still exists in the Anglosphere, of course it would exist in the world of letters as well.The Mythical English Reader is, therefore, not a form of benign snobbery (if snobbery can ever be benign) but serves as a superego of whiteness, policing all literature so that it continues to affirm the superiority and cultural capital of whiteness, because in the end, cultural capital leads to actual capital, and the goal is to keep the money within the family.

An Asian American writing instructor once warned me that the Anglophonic literary world used phrases like “the beauty of the language” as a reactionary code for excluding writers of color from the center of the establishment. I wondered what he was talking about at the time, but understood well enough as I entered the industry and kept on encountering weird situations where “beautiful language” honors were conferred on some truly mediocre white writing that followed the style of the status quo—which is a kind of flat and overly “clear” pseudo-Hemingway pastiche of workshop-ready minimalism—while anything else was branded as “bad writing” or “awkward.”

They are the white gaze manifested into flesh.

Note the mention of Hemingway here (talk about a white person going up against brown skinned people in his conquests and exploitations). Hemingway, because of his privileged-expat life among brown people, was the whitest of all white authors, the god of all Mythical English Readers, and this is why his DNA runs so deep in American letters today.

In the end, “awkward,” for me, always invites the question: awkward to whom? (White people.) And what makes it awkward? (A white person didn’t write it.)

I was once asked to submit to a publisher who is infamous in Koreanist circles for pairing Korean translators with white monolingual writers, as “co-translation” teams. These are setups where the Korean translator gets stuck with doing a crib translation and the white monolingual does some editing and gets credit for imbuing “artistry” (whiteness) on the work of the Korean translator, who is relegated to being a mere technician. I had just come off a similar “co-translation” where an editor was given co-translator credit despite only having been an editor of the work. It was a completely insulting process from beginning to end (interestingly, the edits flattened the prose dramatically).

I also had to practically bludgeon this editor repeatedly about getting the paperwork for my payment, which just goes to show how little they cared about my work, my time, and my rights as a translator. In cases like this, the Mythical English Reader becomes a literal English reader, a living, breathing reader who has the power to change the very words of your translation merely because they are white and you are not. They are the white gaze manifested into flesh. And in this case, they take your credit and your very real money and advance their own interests by exploiting your labor.

Or ruining it. A literary translation school in Korea, without bothering to inform me, once replaced me with a white instructor who immediately alienated my former students by openly disparaging Korean women writers in his first session, and proceeded to destroy the workshop I had painstakingly helped to build up over the years. The fiasco left aspiring translators in Korea, most of them people of color, with one less route into the profession, further enabling white people’s social and actual capital to be kept within their possession.

Submitting my sample, I told the publisher that I was aware of his publications that engaged in this heinous practice, and that I was categorically unwilling to engage in it. He rejected the manuscript.

In recent years, I have come to the realization that if we want to change the way our translations are published, the way to do it is not only through individual action but through changing the entire landscape of publishing. The best way to help yourself is to change the system for everyone, instead of aiming to become another token for the perpetuation of whiteness. We all have limited time and energy, but there are still many ways to identify the cracks in the system that we can shove a wedge into or the points of leverage we can place a fulcrum upon, and it’s going to take all of these little efforts and opportunities combined into a movement to make changes that will truly benefit individuals.

This is your time now. You have entered the landscape. You’re the realest thing in it.

Examples of this include Indonesian author Khairani Barokka’s refusal to italicize non-English words in her writing, translator Rosalind Harvey offering free mentoring slots specifically for translators of color, and joining a translator collective or creating one yourself (you only really need three people to make a collective). I’m currently in three, and each makes a big difference to how I think about my practice.

For example, the ALTA BIPOC Caucus, founded by some talented translators whom I deeply admire, provides a treasure trove of information and connections, not to mention an easy way to give back to the BIPOC translator community in various ways. Collectives make sense for translators; our work is inherently collaborative (we deal with virtually every level of publishing, from rightsholders to editorial to publicity to readers), and the publishing world is so opaque that you need all the help you can get to pass the gatekeepers.

Point being, we need a movement to make real changes in the landscape, and movements mean collective action, the sum of all of our individual efforts coalescing into a single, anticolonial direction.

When I’m translating, I always imagine the author across the table from me, telling me the story in Korean. I never feel alone when I translate, and by the end of the book I feel as if the author and I have been sitting and working together for a long time.It is always a shock to meet the author in person because I feel extremely close to them but they haven’t spent nearly as much time with me. It’s really the author whom I’m thinking of when I translate, and it’s really me for whom I’m translating—I am the true English reader.

So, the next time someone tries to gaslight you by asserting the authority of a mythical being over your own reading, call it out. No, you may not use that excuse, you need to come up with a real reason. No, either take ownership of your own prejudices or stay silent. This is your time now. You have entered the landscape. You’re the realest thing in it.

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Excerpted from Violent Phenomena: Essays Toward the Future of Literary Translation. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher, HarperVia, an imprint of HarperCollins. Copyrighted 2022 by Anton Hur.