A discussion from the 2014 American Literary Translators Association conference of PEN’s “Model Contract for Literary Translations.”
Good for ALTA and for PEN for educating translators about how to negotiate contracts for literary publications, how to protect themselves from “work for hire” and other nefarious practices, and how to understand the terminology typically contained in publishing contracts.
But too bad the PEN Translation Committee’s Alex Zucker and Margaret Carson chose not only to ignore No Peanuts! recent efforts in this area but actually to work against them.
No Peanuts! deserved their solidarity but, much more importantly, translators deserved their solidarity. And not just the 1042 people who signed our petition asking publishers to stop rustling translators’ copyrights.
