Working in Circles from Translator to Kulturmittler

Translators Are Part of the Team

Late last year, a literary theatre agency I have worked with a number of times wrote me that a theatre in Austria is interested in producing a play by one of “my” London playwrights they represent. Would I like to translate that? Yes, I said, of course, being much delighted about the opportunity.

In Germany as well as in some central European countries (like Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia), agencies exist that exclusively represent playwrights and their plays. Some nowadays even represent directors or creative teams in theatre. For the longest time in my career, I usually received translation jobs for theatre from agencies that purchased foreign rights to plays. In this case, as in many others, I had discovered the playwright myself.

I know that the agency does not pay me a fee but only royalties, which is a nasty aspect of working for literary theatre agencies in general.

This play is a welcome opportunity to work with a great British writer after I translated two other plays of hers. I love her writing for the combination of her poetic stories, her often dreamlike settings, and a reliable dramaturgy that still requires German directors to develop their own vision of how to stage the play—which is generally a prerequisite for plays for the German market.

I know that the agency does not pay me a fee but only royalties, which is a nasty aspect of working for literary theatre agencies in general; in all other circumstances, I am paid for the translation and then receive a percentage of the royalties, too. Anyway, I signed the contract, and, yes, let us mention money: the collaboration entitled me to a non-refundable advance of 1,500 Euros and royalties of 1.5 percent of all proceeds earned with my translation. (Some agencies will offer 2 percent.) Although these agencies are private enterprises that collect money using the rights to plays they represent, many theatres in Germany are public institutions financed by tax money. Agencies therefore profit from public monies whenever they receive payments from theatres. So my payment here is at least partially tax money.

With a translation agreement in hand, I am eligible to apply for grants with the German Translators Fund (Deutscher Übersetzerfonds or DÜF), which is a program of the Federal Commissioner for Culture and the Media, and thus a government program. The fund’s goal is to remedy somewhat the precarious situation of literary translators due to the comparatively meager payments in our industry. It has only been accepting applications from theatre translators for a few years, and I am proud to say that the work and visibility of Drama Panorama was not quite innocent in initiating that shift in policy. About two months after I applied, the jury granted 2,000 Euros to support my work on this text, which keeps me busy for about three months, give or take, on and off.

Late in my career, I have come to understand what Jeremy Tiang describes in his essay in this series: the idea that the translator should not be part of the production process or creative team is a misconception. In the theatrical territories of Europe that I have wandered, translators are not regarded as part of the production team. (From my slim experience in the United States, where authors generally rank higher, the translator is more often welcome as a team member.) When the translator can be in the rehearsal room, however, the text is better. Getting that understanding across requires my persistence because the production teams, namely directors, often display little interest in having another person in the room who may, they seem to feel, interfere with their process. In the case of the Austrian production, I pestered the director (whom I know) until he suggested that I visit them for a reading rehearsal with the playwright. Travel expenses, accommodation, and ticket for the opening are now part of my contract. Success.

The European Union supports international cultural exchange, mostly with mobility and exchange programs that bring together artists from more than two eligible countries, while national programs cover the support of domestic artists.

Cross-European funding

We can already see that my European colleagues and I largely depend on public funding, particularly programs that aim to support the independent arts community. While this sounds great, it often involves extensive administrative work for the application, the accounting, and the post-project reporting. I have the privilege of co-curating the literary translation festival translationale berlin 2025, for which we are currently busy preparing four funding applications for different programs on federal and state levels, as well as additional applications with international foundations like the Swiss Pro Helvetia and the Austrian Embassy. This means weeks and months of preparation even before any money is granted. Current severe budget cuts (due to war in Ukraine, military and transportation infrastructure maintenance, etc.) are particularly painful after a very lush situation during the years of the pandemic when the then commissioner for culture dished out a generous additional one billion Euros in the Neustart Kultur program to make a federal budget of 3.2 billion to keep us afloat. Now, we are looking at a total of 2.2 billion for 2025. That is a little more than the 2.15 billion allocated in 2024. Despite a higher overall budget, the federal funds (including the translators fund) expect budget cuts of 45 percent. This prospect has already thinned out programs, with fewer, smaller grants given.

In Germany, public funding schemes operate on every level of the democratic set-up: the national, the state, the commune. Living in a member state of the European Union (and the largest one, for that matter), I am also part of the European arts community. As a translator, I naturally deal with colleagues and theatremakers across the continent. Here, too, alliances are essential: the European Theatre Convention, the Fence, Eurodram, Fabulamundi (a large Creative Europe project), Out of the Wings Festival in London, Plateforme between France and Germany—there are so many connecting us across borders. Even though the European Union was founded as an alliance to secure economic market interests, it developed a cultural policy of its own. European Union monies are distributed to artists in Europe through various programs under one umbrella tool, Creative Europe, which has a budget of just over 350 million Euros for 2025. This goes to transnational arts projects in and around the European Union that are not covered by national programs, and it obviously plays into my personal interests as an artist to reach out and collaborate with artists.