In two fall catalogs I combed through this morning (FSG and Europa, print PDFs), six titles had the translator on the front, and the typography wasn’t an afterthought; it felt like a reframe of authorship. Are you all noticing the same shift, and does it change how you negotiate credit or even how you shape a book’s voice?
I’m seeing it too, and I now negotiate a clause for front-cover credit plus explicit ONIX listing (role B06) so retailers surface the translator — makes that “reframe of authorship” more than just a nice font. Some crime/YA imprints still push back, so I bring recent Europa/NYRB examples and BISG’s metadata guide to the meeting: https://bisg.org/page/metadata. Has anyone tied a small bonus or fee bump to securing the cover credit?
Noticed the same in the FSG fall PDF — when the credit is part of the main lockup, I ask the designer to set ‘Translated by …’ at about 70% of the author name and put it on the spine, baked into the jacket memo. @daniel84, beyond ONIX, I also make sure Edelweiss and NetGalley carry the translator so early buzz and retailer feeds don’t drop it. The only caveat: paperback reprints will quietly lose it unless the spec is in the mechanicals.
My go-to ask now is to bake the translation credit into the title page and the EPUB’s dc:contributor (role=trl) so the “reframe of authorship” doesn’t evaporate in reprints and retailer feeds. Small caveat: on cramped layouts I’ll trade size for permanence and push for a roundel or spine mention instead. Anyone had luck getting NetGalley/Edelweiss to surface the translator near the byline, or is that still whack‑a‑mole?
One tweak that’s helped me: I ask for a 180px-wide jacket thumbnail test so the ‘Translated by’ line stays legible in retailer grids; if it drops out, we adjust weight/placement before the ‘print PDFs’ lock, which avoids late-change fees. Do you also request alternate social and e-comm crops so that line survives? It’s often the difference between being visible at 150px and vanishing.