Translators Aloud
Translators Aloud is a YouTube channel devoted to sharing the work of literary translators, both published and unpublished, all read by the translators themselves. The channel came into being in late May 2020, in the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic, when Tina Kover posted on Twitter that she was considering uploading a video of herself reading from one of her translations but wasn’t sure if anyone would be interested in watching such a thing. The response was tremendous, both from readers expressing their desire to see a translation read by its creator and from translators who had entertained both similar desires to read their own work publicly, and similar doubts that it would find an audience. Charlie Coombe, surprised that such a platform didn’t already exist for literary translators, suggested to Tina that they create one–and by the end of the day, the YouTube channel that became Translators Aloud was born.
Still going strong after four years, we have gained nearly 2,500 YouTube subscribers and over 4,500 Twitter followers. The channel continues to grow in reach and evolve day by day, and we have been blown away by the positive engagement. To date, we have shared over 600 videos by around 400 translators working from or into 48 languages, and some weeks we have been posting videos every day, including feature weeks spotlighting different languages or themes including Women in Translation, New Books in German, the Stephen Spender Prize for Poetry in Translation, International Translation Day, Children’s and Young Adult literature, and Jewish Book Week.
We are also proud to have sponsored the first Translators Aloud bursary in July 2022, funding full participation by an ethnically-diverse translator in the British Centre for Literary Translation Summer School, and we are funding a Travel Bursary for the BCLT in 2023.
How can you help? One way you can support our fundraising efforts is by buying our faaabulous merchandise!
Tina Kover
Tina is the translator of more than thirty books from French, including Anne Berest’s The Postcard (a 2024 finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize), Alexandre Dumas’s Georges, and Mahir Guven’s Older Brother (a 2020 finalist for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize). Her translation of Négar Djavadi’s Disoriental won the 2019 Albertine Prize and the Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Fiction and was shortlisted for the 2020 International Dublin Literary Award; Disoriental was also a finalist for the 2018 (American) National Book Award, the PEN Translation Prize, the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, and the Scott Moncrieff Prize. Recent translations include Hervé Le Corre’s In the Shadow of the Fire (winner of a 2019 French Voices Award), Haitian poet and journalist Emmelie Prophète’s Blue, the nonfiction volume The Science of Middle-earth, and Alexandra Lapierre’s Belle Greene. She also leads literary translation workshops for the American Literary Translators Association and masterclasses in literary translation for Durham University.
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Charlotte Coombe
Charlie is an award-winning British literary translator working from Spanish, French and Catalan into English. Shortlisted for the Queen Sofía Spanish Institute Translation Prize 2023, winner of the Oran Robert Perry Burke Award 2022 and shortlisted for the Valle Inclán Translation Prize 2019. Her published translations include Far by Rosa Ribas, The Seaweed Revolution by Vincent Doumeizel, December Breeze by Marvel Moreno, Fish Soup and Holiday Heart by Margarita García Robayo, Khomeini, Sade and Me by Abnousse Shalmani, The President’s Room by Ricardo Romero, and The Imagined Land by Eduardo Berti. Her translations have been published in journals such as The White Review, The Southern Review, Modern Poetry in Translation, Latin American Literature Today, Words Without Borders, and World Literature Today. She is currently co-translating Killing the Nerve by Anna Pazos, from the Catalan (forthcoming from Foundry Editions in 2025).
As well as co-founding Translators Aloud, she has created the collaborative Literary Translation Database resource, and offers mentoring to emerging literary translators.
She is also an ‘anywhere person’, living in other people’s homes full-time and cuddling their pets.