In a white paper released March 31, PEN America documents the persistent inequities in how U.S. publishers compensate and credit literary translators, while also warning that AI poses a growing threat to translators' livelihoods.
The report, "Fairness in Publishing: The State of Literary Translation in the U.S.," positions itself as a response to the organization's 1969 Manifesto on Translation, which declared that translators' "names are usually forgotten, they are grotesquely underpaid, and their services, however skillfully rendered, are regarded with the slightly patronizing and pitying respect formerly reserved for junior housemaids." A 2023 update, which PEN America also references throughout the new report, found that despite increased attention to the plight of translators, the publishing industry still "undervalues translation." The new white paper suggests little has changed in the intervening three years and the situation may be even more challenging.
Drawing on interviews conducted between January 2025 and February 2026 with 17 translators and 20 editors at publishing houses, alongside data from the Authors Guild and other organizations, the report examines pay rates, copyright protections, royalties, naming rights, and the accelerating adoption of AI as a translation tool. It finds translators are still largely underpaid freelancers without collective bargaining rights, their names often left off book covers, and under threat of being replaced by AI.
"The fact that the translation publication space is so dominated by small presses, including academic imprints and nonprofits—an inversion of the larger trade publication ecosystem—means that many of the publishers who are most motivated to act as allies for translators have the least resources to do so," the report states. Independent and nonprofit presses publish 86% of works in translation, compared with 14% from Big Five publishers, according to a 2019 PW analysis cited in the report—a near-complete inversion of the Big Five's estimated 80% share of the broader U.S. book market.
On pay, the Authors Guild's 2022 survey put the average rate for literary translation at 13 cents per word, with the largest group of respondents reporting they were paid 10 cents per word or less. Rates varied dramatically, from 1 cent per word to more than 40 cents, in large part because translators, as freelancers, have no means of collective bargaining. Kendall Storey of Catapult Books told PEN America that the press typically pays "between 12 and 16 cents per word as an advance upon royalties—the royalty being 1%," adding that it "has to be case by case" given differences in translator experience and individual rate policies.
The report warns that this case-by-case norm risks suppressing pay for translators working in languages perceived as less commercially valuable. It draws a direct parallel to arguments publishers have historically made against publishing authors of color, noting that each rationale "implicitly rests on the concept of one monolithic, monocultural reader, someone who can only relate to people who look or speak like them—even as demographic and readership data explodes this assumption."
The literary translation field remains over 80% white, per the 2022 Authors Guild survey. For translators of color working in less commonly translated languages, the report finds "these inequities are compounded when the very language they translate is itself seen as a less valuable investment." To broaden the field, the report argues that "the U.S. publishing industry needs to do two things: first, recognize the need to publish more works in underrepresented languages, including languages with very few entry points outside their own communities, and second, more critically interrogate the fact that our notions of underrepresentation have as much to do with access to the corridors of cultural power as with demographic considerations."
Another issue is that literary culture appears to favor certain major "pivot languages," including French, German, Spanish, Italian, and Japanese. Chad Post, publisher of Open Letter Books and compiler of the University of Rochester's Translation Database, pointed out that even with a surfeit of translations from a given language, that doesn't necessarily lead to greater commercial success. "It's hard for the number of books in translation to increase significantly if the whole system is set up to reward one book at a time significantly and all the rest are just pushed into obscurity," Post said.
Financial support for literary translation in the U.S. depends heavily on grants from foreign governments, a practice that heavily informs which translators get paid and which projects get made. The report notes that the 2022 Authors Guild survey found that 36% of surveyed translators relied on their publisher receiving a grant in order to be paid at all. If there is no grant to support a book, it can often mean the book doesn't get published. Daniel Slager of Milkweed Editions said of a recent poetry collection in translation, without a grant from overseas, "I'd like to think I would have taken the book anyway, but I'm not sure I would have."
Furthermore, when it comes to finding funding at home, the situation is only getting worse. Last May the Trump administration rescinded or terminated more than $27 million in National Endowment for the Arts grants. The 2026 class of NEA Translation Fellows has not been announced, and the report states there is no public information indicating whether the fellowship program will survive.
The AI Threat
On AI, the report cites a 2025 Microsoft study identifying translators and interpreters as the profession with the highest "occupational impact" from the technology, with the study's authors stating that 98% of their work overlapped with tasks requested of Microsoft's Copilot. The impact is already being felt. In January 2026, Harlequin's French division stopped using many of its in-house translators in favor of AI tools combined with freelance post-editors. Academic publisher Taylor & Francis announced in March 2025 that it would use AI to translate English titles into more than 30 languages it deemed too small to justify human translation costs.
Milkweed Editions' Slager said these moves reflected "a fundamental misunderstanding about the way language is used in literary texts." French-to-English translator Kate Deimling told PEN America, "The more people rely on AI, the less original content gets produced, which will then lead to the decrease of the perceived value of the originality of translation, as well as the value of the profession as a whole."
The report calls for what it terms the ART framework, which stands for "Authorization, Remuneration, and Transparency," requiring that translators be able to authorize or refuse the use of their work to train large language models, and receive payment when that work is used. Dan Simon of Seven Stories Press said that royalties, even when modest, are "also very much an issue of respect . . . since the translator begins their work knowing that they have a contractually protected right to participate in the future success of the work."
In the end, this all returns to a simple argument for why any of this matters. As translator Sandra Smith put it, "Translation is not just about words. It's about culture, about knowledge, about how people think. As translators, we are introducing different cultures to one another. Without translation, without that interchange, culture withers."
