Dictionary corner: successful translators not only know the language; they immerse
themselves in the culture, too. Photo: Guardian/Graham Turner
Only three per cent of books published in the UK every year are originally written in another language. Literary translator Eric Dickens describes the past, present and future of the art of translation, and explains why it's time the British publishing industry stopped ignoring the rest of the world.

Over the past 15 years, the countries of central and eastern Europe have come in from the cold. Most have now joined the European Union, and they have been featured in travel programmes, such as Kirsty Wark's visits to the "new" parts of Europe (they are, in fact, very old). We will soon be treated to something similar, presented by Michael Palin.

However, what people in the countries think remains something of a mystery. British people travelling to those countries tell British audiences and readers what to think about them while the locals provide the soundbites.

The solution is simple: more English translations of fiction and non-fiction from those countries. This is where the Brit should intervene - as a translator. Translators are often thought of as backroom boys and girls who keep out of the limelight. They are assumed to ingest something in "foreign" and spew it out in English. This is far from what translators do in real life.

Literary and academic translators must have a formidable education behind them. The successful ones are generally not young graduates but much older people, coming from academia, publishing, librarianship. They are people who have found it satisfying to act as cicerones for a culture not their own. They have not only learnt the foreign language; they have immersed themselves in the culture in which that language is embedded.

After the second world war and the division of Europe, a phenomenon arose: exile. The first generation of exiles did not know enough English to become translators and the second were too busy integrating and making ends meet. Now we have the third and fourth generations: people whose ancestors have come from eastern or central Europe, but are Brits through and through. So they know the vocabulary and the idiom of Britain and they have street cred among their compatriots. Yet there is also a tiny but crucial germ of yearning that takes them back to the lands and languages of their forebears.

Language is identity. Across the whole world, millions of people live their whole lives in a mental space that only marginally involves English. Yet these people are not intellectual cripples. Far from it. They can often communicate internationally using English, and still have a reserve of their own - their mother tongue.

At the London Book Fair we were treated to soothing words that told us that it was quite normal that only three per cent of books published in Britain are translations. At the Leipzig Book Fair a few days later, a Ukrainian intellectual spoke about the state of his culture. Yuri Andrukhovych has written one of the few Ukrainian postmodernist novels to have been translated into English - Perverzion, translated by Michael Naydan - but he is also a blunt purveyor of home truths when it comes to central and eastern Europe. At Leipzig, Andrukhovych suggested that Ukrainians should be afforded visa-free travel to western Europe. But are they being afforded such travel into the minds of British readers?

We do, in Britain, have a number of publishers, such as Serpents' Tail, Harvill-Secker, Arc, Peter Owen, Hesperus, Portobello and several others that promote translations of literature. But as British television does not have a high-prestige books programme, such as the German Literarisches Quartett with the colourful Marcel Reich-Ranicki or the French Apostrophes with Bernard Pivot, British readers never get to know that there are more than a very few non-English books worth reading.

Britain is lagging behind. I fear that the fog may not be so much in the Channel, cutting off the continentals from Britain, but in the minds of those British publishers, editors and journalists that continue to take an introverted view of "world" literature, where only that written in English counts as "real".