Translator magazine reads the world differently
Charles Emmerson is the editor of Translator, the magazine that launched in June this year, promising to bring its readers stories from beyond the Anglosphere. I first met him at Indiecon in 2024, and at that point he was gathering inspiration and refining his idea, but right from the start it made perfect sense: There’s a whole world of great storytelling out there that’s inaccessible to me because I only speak English, so of course I want to read a magazine that searches out and translates choice cuts from far-flung parts of the globe.
As he explains in the conversation above, the magazine doesn’t just use translation: It studies it, reflecting on the role of the translator in shaping a new version of the story. The pages include extensive marginalia, zooming in on specific words and giving more context on them, or explaining why one word was favoured over another in the process of translating.
It’s fascinating stuff, and as he says, it’s important too, especially for English readers: “People who speak English, because there’s so much written in English, tend to imagine the world kind of takes place in English… So we can live in this sort of rather golden, glorious, but monolingual media bubble. And with all the ways the world is changing, it might be helpful, good, and indeed urgent, to read the world differently.”
I had a great time speaking with him, so I hope you’ll enjoy the conversation above, or the video below. And if you’d like to hear more conversations with independent magazine makers, please follow us on Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts, and we’ll be able to deliver our new episodes to you as soon as they’re ready.
