On Translation Fiction and the Comfort of Monolingualism

Marie Lambert analyzes recent works of fiction that feature translators as protagonists, and the questions they raise about cross-cultural communication in a heterogeneous world.

By Marie LambertSeptember 15, 2025

• Literary Criticism

• Fiction

IN THE TWO decades since a PEN World Voices study revealed that translated literature made up less than three percent of books published in English annually, the question of the relative provincialism of American readers has been a bugbear for a publishing industry that prides itself on its liberal and globalist sensibilities. Despite the nervous headline questions—“Do Americans Hate Foreign Fiction?”—the reasons for the three percent phenomenon are no mystery. It is well documented that corporate publishers are wary of investing in “foreign” writers, especially those without an existing Anglophone reader base to justify a marketing budget. For the chronically low wages that literary translators can expect for their labor, the marginal costs of taking a foreign work through the editing and printing process are often treated as reason enough to avoid translations altogether—especially when facing the notoriously insular tastes of American audiences.

While American readers appear largely uninterested in books in translation, they seem to have far less reticence when it comes to stories about translation. Genre fiction involving translators—spy capers, historical romances, murder mysteries—has long been popular with American audiences. Furthermore, over the past decade, the Anglophone publishing market has seen a notable surge in what I call “translation fiction”: works that purposefully foreground linguistic translation and its practitioners in their narratives and thematic stakes. For these novels, translation isn’t just a gimmick to serve the ends of a three-act plot; it’s also a thoughtful and detailed dimension of their narrative and conceptual trajectories.

Some recent works in this category include a speculative alternative history in which translation-based magic is a weapon for empire, R. F. Kuang’s Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence (2022); a gothic satire featuring a corporation that promises language mastery with sinister consequences, Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi’s The Centre (2023); and an ambitious metafictional eco-thriller about a group of literary translators in the thrall of an enigmatic author, Jennifer Croft’s The Extinction of Irena Rey (2024). Although diverse in terms of genre, these novels are united by their attention to translation as a complex, interpersonal, and political act.

It’s hard not to want to see the emergence and relative success of this kind of fiction as promising—a potential inroad for publishers to bring international narratives to American audiences without recourse to the niche, marginalized field of literary translation itself. Finding an opening for meaningful engagement with international perspectives seems particularly urgent today, as the current presidential administration turns to ever more violent means to excise the “foreign” from American culture. Where tariffs and ICE raids conspire to enforce national borders, translation fiction conspires to cross them and, in the process, potentially ignite or deepen the awareness of its audience to some of the realities of the multilingual world from which they may be largely shielded.

Yet if we look closely at several recent works of translation fiction, a more ambivalent story emerges. While seeming to challenge Anglo-American insularity, these novels—all written in English and featuring translators as narrators and protagonists—instead offer readers a way to approach linguistic or cultural difference while remaining untouched by its otherness. Filtered through the perspective of the translator—who understands, articulates, and navigates what the monolingual reader cannot—translation fiction at once presents and neutralizes foreignness. In the process, these novels end up reaffirming long-standing suspicions about what it means to cross linguistic and cultural borders.

Translation is an ancient and necessary practice, but it’s also something more fraught: threatening to one’s sense of self, prone to misunderstanding or manipulation, unnecessarily complicated or exhausting, and best attempted by specialists. The result is a domesticated experience with linguistic difference that I fear ultimately does less to challenge monolingual isolation than to further entrench it.

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Katie Kitamura’s 2021 novel Intimacies is one of the early successful examples of recent Anglo-American translation fiction, earning praise from critics and readers alike after its release. The novel is narrated by an anonymous woman, recently moved from New York to the Netherlands on a one-year contract as an interpreter for an international court in The Hague (a thinly veiled analogue to the UN’s International Court of Justice). Through the unnamed narrator’s experience giving voice to the victims and perpetrators of global human rights abuses, Kitamura explores how the crossing of linguistic boundaries provokes a relational entanglement that is neither straightforward nor volitional, nor entirely comforting.

Throughout the novel, Kitamura’s narrator is drawn into a number of unprecedented and often destabilizing relationships—with the victim of a violent mugging, her lover’s wife, an attorney defending a former president accused of war crimes, and the accused himself. While many of these unsettling “intimacies” occur outside of the interpreter’s booth, the novel suggests that the narrator’s professional life predisposes her to a kind of affective openness that comes with ambivalent consequences. In this way, Kitamura makes a thematic move common in contemporary fiction about translators—translation becomes a figure for encountering difference writ large, sharpening underlying ethical and existential questions around the unstable nature of the self and our responsibilities to and for others. A similar problematic plays out in Ledia Xhoga’s 2024 novel Misinterpretation, in which an Albanian interpreter living in New York becomes immersed in the past of her client, a Kosovar torture survivor, with significant consequences for her life and marriage.

In Intimacies, the point around which this exploration pivots is the narrator’s assignment to interpret for the trial of a former president of an unnamed West African nation who is accused of war crimes after a contested election. Initially repelled by the charges levied against the man whose French words she must reiterate in English, the narrator is drawn into an unwitting and unconscious identification with him:

Over the course of those long hours in the booth, I sometimes had the unpleasant sensation that of all the people in the room below, of all the people in the city itself, the former president was the person I knew best. In those moments, out of what I can only describe as an excess of imagination, he became the person whose perspective I occupied. I flinched when the proceedings seemed to go against him, I felt quiet relief when they moved in his direction.

Although disturbed by this experience, and cognizant of the president’s efforts to ingratiate himself with her and others on the court, she nonetheless can’t entirely shake off these episodes of unwanted empathy; ultimately, she has little defense beyond shrinking herself even more, leaning into her passivity as an escape.

The affective vulnerability of translation practitioners also appears in Croft’s The Extinction of Irena Rey, in which a group of translators grapple with a knot of professional and romantic dilemmas after the disappearance of their author. While Croft’s madcap story is considerably lighter in tone than Kitamura’s, it also stages translation as a process of transformative entanglement that can blur the boundaries between the self and others. The novel, a fictional debut for the award-winning translator of Olga Tokarczuk, is set at the Polish home of the mysterious and demanding author, Irena Rey, who convenes her exclusive team of translators with the promise of a new manuscript, only to promptly disappear. Through the group’s psychosexual antics, Croft illustrates to the point of absurdity the affective slippage that occurs between translators and those whose words they render. As they attempt to find a way forward in the wake of the functional death of their author, devoted Spanish translator (and narrator) Emi castigates her English-language rival, Alexis, for wearing “Our Author’s” clothing and jewelry, only to pillage Irena’s beauty products and shoes herself—each in their own way seeking to channel the authority of the missing writer and enforce their vision of “fidelity” upon the new novel.

Yet more notable for Croft is the horizontal identification within the group of translators themselves. Contra the quasi-theological approach to literary translation imposed by their “beloved” author, the translators begin to flirt with a new, more collaborative framework for their work, inspired by the vibrant ecosystem of the neighboring primeval forest. Pointing out the similarities between the metamorphic properties of fungi and literary translation as a kind of cultural “recycling,” mycology enthusiast Freddie (Rey’s Swedish translator) advocates for a less adversarial, more collaborative vision of their craft. Just as mycelia “d[o]n’t have strictly delineated bodies like animals or plants,” so translators should see themselves as fundamentally linked, a collective body striving together to facilitate global communication and cultural circulation. Despite the deep enmity between Emi and Alexis, Croft’s narrator will, by book’s end, begrudgingly admit to her dependence on her rival and the other translators: “Alexis was the worst, but she was one of us. I understood that no matter what, it would have been impossible for me to kill Alexis because I was Alexis, or Alexis was as much a part of me as I was.” That such a statement follows the group’s brush with homicide and identity theft need not lessen its import. It may color, however, our sense of the benevolent and cooperative vision of translation that Freddie (and the book) puts forward.

Both of these novels dramatize the very real emotional complexities of translation, along with its potential to engender unfamiliar attachments and allegiances. Yet at the same time, they also position translation itself as a process that can threaten the integrity of the self and one’s existing relationships and commitments. When the fruits of this process are, per these novels, co-dependency, criminal conspiracy, marital crisis, and even madness, translation looks dangerously close to a liability—an interpersonal and existential risk, perhaps best to be avoided. After all, the narrator of Intimacies is so disturbed by her experience with the former president that she leaves her job entirely and decides to put her emotional malleability to use in a different realm: heterosexual monogamy. During a reunion with her estranged lover at the end of the book, the narrator leans heavily on her interpreter’s emotional flexibility, nudging herself into empathy with his position and, with it, potential reconciliation. “I could understand anything,” she admits, “under the right circumstances and for the right person. It was both a strength and a weakness.”

If interlingual communication can be emotionally and existentially fraught at the individual level, its political and cultural ramifications are potentially even more suspect. For Kitamura’s narrator, relinquishing her position at the court is both an escape from the jarring ethical dimensions of the interpreter’s role and a way to avoid confronting the discomfiting politics that her position underwrote. As the former president points out in their final meeting: “Under different circumstances your State Department would be on trial here, not me.” Kitamura’s narrator knows this, having admitted early in the novel that the court, although an ostensibly international institution, had a clear Western bias and was disproportionately focused on prosecuting crimes in African nations. Yet she seems loath to engage with this fact, instead repressing the unequal dynamics that privilege the interests of the Global North and her own role, as interpreter of English and French (the court’s working languages), in enforcing them.

Similarly, Irena Rey highlights several types of potential exploitation built into the practice of literary translation. Midway through the story, a mysterious archer’s shooting spree, under the xenophobic slogan “Keep invasive species out of Poland,” spurs the group to debate whether their work as translators could have a damaging impact on the Polish “literary ecosystem” upon which they draw. Moreover, Croft frames the ridiculously regimented, controlling relationship Irena Rey forces upon her translators—who are required to work under her eye in weeks-long retreats and forbidden from eating meat, discussing the weather, and translating for other Polish authors—as another type of systemic creative and professional oppression. Irena, we learn, has been abusing the “sacred” intimacy of the translation relationship, mining her translators for childhood traumas and sensational stories to steal and fill her novels with (as she has filled her home with pilfered historical artifacts and personal items). In a wry twist, Croft reverses the infamous aphorism “traduttore, traditore”—“translator, traitor.” Here, it is the translators who are betrayed and manipulated, both by their authors and by the global literary industry that would extract value from and erase their labor—a reality that Croft has worked to call attention to and combat. If Irena’s translators ultimately agree to cover up her death and continue to produce fraudulent translations under her name, it is only the result of a system that has made their work marginal and contingent upon the profitability of an author. In translation, the potential for exploitation runs both ways.

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While the translators of Croft’s and Kitamura’s novels briefly confront the darker side of their craft, the young translators of Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence , Kuang’s fantastical alternative history, are granted no such blissful uncertainty. Where other works of translation fiction gesture toward some of the political and ethical complexities of rendering one language into another—for instance, the uneven dynamics and direction of translation, or the differential value of European versus non-European languages—Kuang makes the history of translation’s collusion with power her novel’s narrative engine.

In Babel’s vision of the 19th century, language acquisition is a functional tool for primitive accumulation, the violent, resource-extracting process Marx saw as foundational to capitalist growth. Britain is an empire fueled by translation magic, with Oxford University’s Royal Institute of Translation (i.e., “Babel”) serving as the workshop for developing the linguistic “match-pairs” that help the empire wield power at home and abroad. The novel follows a group of multiracial students enrolled at Babel, detailing their awakening to the complicity of academia with empire and their subsequent efforts to resist the mechanisms exploiting foreign cultures and resources for imperial profit. Although initially structured as a magical-school story in the tradition of the Harry Potter series or Lev Grossman’s The Magicians (2009), Kuang’s novel soon sets itself apart with its infusion of historical materialism, critical politics, and a healthy dose of translation theory. The resulting work is a rigorously constructed anti-colonial fable, complete with detailed explication of the historical politics of English translation practice and its weaponization by empire—no matter that this emphasis earns the author charges of excessive didacticism by some critics.

Kuang’s is not the only example of translation fiction that takes full-throated aim at the craft’s politically fraught (and at times explicitly colonial) history and practice. Siddiqi’s The Centre takes this premise to its dystopian extreme in its tale of a secretive language academy that promises near-instant fluency in any tongue—at the price of the literal cannibalization of marginalized native speakers. The enterprise is run by a wealthy Indian patriarch who, having emigrated and ascended, now profits from the stories, languages, and lives of the poor and desperate. In doing so, the novel suggests, the once-colonized replicate the very logic of British oppression in the Indian subcontinent—extracting value from those with the least power.

While both Kuang’s and Siddiqi’s novels are works of speculative fiction, the histories they echo are all too real. Long before the 19th century, European missionary societies learned local tongues not to preserve them but to translate Christian texts and convert communities. In India, colonial translators and scholars used their linguistic knowledge to draft laws that privileged British property rights and commercial interests. Furthermore, English fluency was cultivated among a narrow class of Indigenous clerks, teachers, and interpreters whose role was to serve the empire while standing apart from the rest of the colonized population.

Yet the justifiable impulse to foreground the oppressive political dimensions of crossing linguistic boundaries can become its own prescription. The powerful historical analogies these novels set up leave little room to imagine language learning or translation outside of the colonial dynamics of mastery and domination. When the act of interlingual contact is framed almost exclusively as an extension of historical exploitation, translation risks being flattened into yet another ethical hazard. Such a move only too easily colludes with many readers’ existing wariness to exit English, whether by consuming media in translation or engaging in provisional language learning. If venturing out of English could make you complicit in neocolonial harm or cultural exploitation, then why attempt it? Better to stay in your own lane, avoid contact with linguistic Others, and enjoy the relative simplicity of a strictly Anglophone life.

The irony is that, despite the nuance these novels achieve at the levels of character and narrative structure, the subtext some readers may take away could confirm their underlying suspicion that monolingualism is safer, cleaner, and more straightforward compared to the messiness and complexity of multilingual life. Moreover, these novels do little to counter the assumption that such an idealized monolingual life is achievable, provided one has access to the privileges of English. For all the care and detail with which translation fiction represents the experiences, history, and concerns of a multilingual reality, it nonetheless does little to challenge, at either a formal or a conceptual level, the dominant position English presently holds across the globe.

English is, in Kuang’s rendering, not only the language of imperial power and scholarship but also the vehicle upon which the would-be revolutionaries are, despite themselves, reliant. English is the working language of Kitamura’s interpreter in The Hague, the language she uses with her Serbian Ethiopian friend and Dutch lover. English is the language into which Emi’s account of Irena’s disappearance was “translated” by Alexis after the story’s events, per the novel’s metafictional conceit, nearly eliding the fact that every line of dialogue between the multinational group of translators would have taken place in Polish, the only language they all shared. For the monolingual Anglo-American reader, the practical implication is clear: if you are going to speak only one language, it might as well be English.

After all, the books themselves are written in English, crafted in prose that is clear and detailed and engaging. Occasional phrases in Mandarin or Polish are immediately glossed or clarified in asides. And why shouldn’t they be? The narrative premise of these works resides in the perspective of the translator, the figure whose duty it is to make the foreign comprehensible to readers.

And here lies the root of what makes translation fiction a far more comforting than culturally estranging experience. By encouraging identification with the figure of the translator, these novels offer readers a way to manage the anxiety that comes with being the monolingual monolith in a heterogeneous, multilingual world—namely, that Others can and do speak among themselves in a way that one cannot comprehend. Simplistic as this may be, one need only look toward the numerous reports of violence against individuals publicly speaking languages other than English to see that such anxiety is pervasive. Despite their ostensibly good intentions, these novels nonetheless offer monolingual readers a domesticated encounter with linguistic otherness via the translator’s mediating expertise. From the position of the monolingual reader, the translator stands outside the existential unease of noncomprehension. They are, rather, the One Who Understands, able to navigate a linguistic gap that is otherwise unbridgeable for the imagined Anglophone reader.

This is not to suggest that these authors believe that translators occupy a place of complete linguistic mastery. In reality, the novels of Kitamura, Croft, and Kuang all feature moments showcasing the fallibility of the translator’s perceived fluency or the insufficiency of linguistic knowledge alone to overcome the gulf required to understand another. Yet ultimately, all of these narrators readily carry their readers through situations of potential noncomprehension, absent much disruption of their understanding of what is happening at the level of language or plot. For all their formal creativity, these works leave very little unclear to the monolingual reader. Croft’s novel, with its flurry of ecological, linguistic, and cultural trivia (much of which seems styled as winks to translation insiders), comes the closest to creating an experience of genuine readerly uncertainty. But still, what is a source of novelty or confusion for the reader is yet another landscape the translator navigates with ease, as Croft’s group takes references to Ötzi the Iceman and the history of Eastern European plane hijackings in stride.

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Through the translator’s narrative guidance, these novels provide a relatively safe and aestheticized experience of otherness. Any confrontation with true linguistic opacity or disruption, the commonplaces of multilingual life, is avoided. For this, such books function as a kind of inoculation for the monolingual reader: a way to approach but not meaningfully engage with multilingual reality.

This might explain some of the success that this type of fiction has had with Anglo-American publishers and readers. No matter your political persuasion, it’s not easy or comforting to face noncomprehension, even in your supposedly native tongue. Yet learning to navigate such confrontations is necessary if we want to have tools beyond reflexive suspicion and antagonism when encountering cultural Others in our interconnected, highly mobile world.

I don’t contest that these books, among other iterations of translation fiction, offer laudable portraits of translation as a complex, creative art and an important dimension of our multilingual reality. But I have serious reservations about what the growing prominence of translation fiction means in a publishing market so devoid of actual translated literature. This is not to pit translation fiction in English and fiction translated into English against each other in a zero-sum model of commercial literary success. However, I think it is crucial to underscore that translation fiction shouldn’t be expected to serve as a solution for the larger economic and cultural issues at the heart of the three percent problem, which are often obscured when the problem is framed as only one of low demand and high supply: chronic undercompensation and devaluation of translators’ labor, cultural xenophobia, and the reliance of many non-Anglophone writers on English-language markets for financial and professional viability.

Translation fiction may gesture toward some of these imbalances, even in a way that communicates a desire to correct them. But as long as it renders linguistic difference entertaining yet neatly contained, it risks leaving these deeper asymmetries intact.

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Correction: An earlier version of this article misread the plot of Ledia Xhoga’s Misinterpretation, and has been updated. LARB regrets the error.