Guidelines for Evaluating Literary Translation in Hiring and Promotion Decisions
In September 2023, the Executive Council approved adding the MLA’s endorsement of the following guidelines drafted by the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA). These guidelines build on and cite the MLA’s Evaluating Translations as Scholarship: Guidelines for Peer Review (2011). The guidelines also have been endorsed by American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA), the American Translators Association (ATA), the American Translation and Interpreting Studies Association (ATISA), and the individuals whose names can be found on ALTA’s website.
The American Literary Translators Association unequivocally recommends that institutions of higher education and research treat works of literary translation as an integral part of dossiers, giving them the same weight as analogous publications (articles, creative works, and monographs) for hiring, tenure, promotion, and merit-pay reviews.
Translation has always been central to the production and dissemination of knowledge and culture. So, too, has it been central to the development of every academic discipline without exception, and it remains essential to their ongoing health and growth. Translation is a fundamentally hybrid practice, conjoining linguistic inquiry, scholarly research, creative invention, and public engagement. It mediates across national, cultural, and linguistic boundaries, as well as across time periods and fields.
Amid our era’s epidemic of language extinction and epistemic exclusion, translation combats what Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o has called the “dictatorship of the monolingual.” Those working in English and other hegemonic languages have a special responsibility to uphold the exchange across languages that sustains the world’s cultures and, in particular, its institutions of higher learning. Translators of literary and humanistic texts, with their profound knowledge of multiple cultural and linguistic contexts, provide essential nodes of contact and transmission, without which culture in general and scholarship in particular would stagnate in what Mikhail Bakhtin terms (in the translation by Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson) a “sealed-off and impermeable monoglossia.”
In literary translation, artistic and scholarly production coincide. Literary translation not only offers access to texts and genres from around the world, but itself constitutes a mode of literary production. It is a form of writing governed by extreme constraints. As rigorous as the composition of a sonnet or sestina, it requires not only a deep understanding of how style is created, but also the ability to write in many different styles; not only a sophisticated mastery of tone and nuance, but a sense of the direction in which a particular word choice will nudge a sentence; not only a profound familiarity with the literary and intellectual history and the cultural context in which the translated work was originally composed, but the ingenuity to make it come alive in another tongue.
Translation can be epoch-making. Works in translation have had a profound impact on human history, and translations of revelatory theoretical texts have revolutionized many intellectual traditions and academic disciplines at critical junctures in their history. Translators can be found across the university, teaching not only translation studies but also literature, languages, creative writing, linguistics, philosophy, history, religion, and social sciences more broadly. Each of these fields, and the many others in which translators work, has its own unique criteria for assessment.
For the evaluation of dossiers containing works of translation, institutions must engage qualified reviewers who can assess the significance of the translator’s achievement, taking these criteria in particular into account:
1. The originality and literary authority of the translator’s voice in shaping the work, and the marks of the translator’s erudition and ability to transform cultural knowledge into illuminating words on the page.
2. The specialized knowledge of the given field—be it contemporary French poetry, medieval Arabic travel writing, Danish sociology, or the 20th-century Japanese novel—that the translation draws on, embodies, deploys, and transmutes via the translator’s knowledge of the norms, terminology, historical and other contextual information, and fundamental concepts of corresponding fields in the target language. The American Council of Learned Societies’ Guidelines for the Translation of Social Science Texts, published in 2006, offers useful advice for a number of specific fields.
3. The challenges posed by the original text, which might be linguistic, stylistic, conceptual, theoretical, scholarly, historical, philosophical, etc., in nature, and the degree to which the translator has met these challenges with skill and panache.
The American Literary Translators Association offers these guidelines for the academic evaluation of the artistic as well as scholarly contributions of faculty members whose work involves literary translation. This statement supports and extends the document Evaluating Translations as Scholarship: Guidelines for Peer Review published in 2011 by the Modern Language Association. Literary translation is a primary creative and scholarly endeavor and not merely auxiliary or supplementary to other forms of academic production. Therefore it should be understood as an integral part of dossiers and given the same weight as analogous publications for hiring, tenure, promotion, and merit-pay reviews.