Working in Circles from Translator to Kulturmittler

As a literary and theatre translator working in English and German, I have been living in Berlin for thirty-four years trying to understand how this business works. And how I work. It has taken me forever. First, I trained and worked as an actor; then I translated my first play, Brothers of the Brush by Jimmy Murphy of Dublin. That translation was never produced. When I went to live in the United States in the mid-nineties, I practically quit acting and eked out a living as a commercial and literary translator. In 2000, I moved back to Berlin, and after 9/11, I took a long break from the States until 2012. Nowadays, I almost exclusively translate literary material, film scripts and subtitles, theatre plays, surtitles, synopses, and prose.

Never having studied translation, I only gradually realized that there is an existing support structure to tap into: public funding. It can help me exist (albeit precariously) while working on what I really want to do. I also joined unions and built associations to take the edge off competition, which all in all shaped one of my central beliefs: we translators need alliances. They allow us to engage in communication and empowerment and, if need be, to take public action for our working conditions instead of working against each other.

The most important organization I am involved with is Drama Panorama: Forum for Translation and Theatre, a registered nonprofit organization, brings together playwrights, academics, and theatremakers within the German language and across languages worldwide through professional activities, events, and publications. From its founding in 2009 until 2023, I was on the board and helped build and grow it. We now have about sixty members mostly from Germany, but also from Austria, Spain, Poland, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands. Last year, I stepped aside so that new people could get involved on the board. The organization works outside of the public institutions but collaborates with them as partners in production. We conceive workshops for education and artistic research, which are great opportunities to bring out the nerds in us. Past events were about special interest areas such as multilingualism on stage, queer drama, translating surtitles—all aspects of the process of translating.

My belief in networking both shaped and was supported by the conditions I work in and under. By examining a few of the projects I am involved in this year, I hope to shed light on some of my main areas of activity. Let me start with the most frequent setting that involves me as a translator working alone for German agencies, and I’ll proceed by expanding the concentric circles to more collaborative and international projects. The following is a paean to translators sitting on so many fences like Beckett’s Belacqua, the seat paid for through policies that understand our importance (if not always our value).

Translators Are Part of the Team

Late last year, a literary theatre agency I have worked with a number of times wrote me that a theatre in Austria is interested in producing a play by one of “my” London playwrights they represent. Would I like to translate that? Yes, I said, of course, being much delighted about the opportunity.

In Germany as well as in some central European countries (like Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia), agencies exist that exclusively represent playwrights and their plays. Some nowadays even represent directors or creative teams in theatre. For the longest time in my career, I usually received translation jobs for theatre from agencies that purchased foreign rights to plays. In this case, as in many others, I had discovered the playwright myself.

I know that the agency does not pay me a fee but only royalties, which is a nasty aspect of working for literary theatre agencies in general.

This play is a welcome opportunity to work with a great British writer after I translated two other plays of hers. I love her writing for the combination of her poetic stories, her often dreamlike settings, and a reliable dramaturgy that still requires German directors to develop their own vision of how to stage the play—which is generally a prerequisite for plays for the German market.

I know that the agency does not pay me a fee but only royalties, which is a nasty aspect of working for literary theatre agencies in general; in all other circumstances, I am paid for the translation and then receive a percentage of the royalties, too. Anyway, I signed the contract, and, yes, let us mention money: the collaboration entitled me to a non-refundable advance of 1,500 Euros and royalties of 1.5 percent of all proceeds earned with my translation. (Some agencies will offer 2 percent.) Although these agencies are private enterprises that collect money using the rights to plays they represent, many theatres in Germany are public institutions financed by tax money. Agencies therefore profit from public monies whenever they receive payments from theatres. So my payment here is at least partially tax money.

With a translation agreement in hand, I am eligible to apply for grants with the German Translators Fund (Deutscher Übersetzerfonds or DÜF), which is a program of the Federal Commissioner for Culture and the Media, and thus a government program. The fund’s goal is to remedy somewhat the precarious situation of literary translators due to the comparatively meager payments in our industry. It has only been accepting applications from theatre translators for a few years, and I am proud to say that the work and visibility of Drama Panorama was not quite innocent in initiating that shift in policy. About two months after I applied, the jury granted 2,000 Euros to support my work on this text, which keeps me busy for about three months, give or take, on and off.

Late in my career, I have come to understand what Jeremy Tiang describes in his essay in this series: the idea that the translator should not be part of the production process or creative team is a misconception. In the theatrical territories of Europe that I have wandered, translators are not regarded as part of the production team. (From my slim experience in the United States, where authors generally rank higher, the translator is more often welcome as a team member.) When the translator can be in the rehearsal room, however, the text is better. Getting that understanding across requires my persistence because the production teams, namely directors, often display little interest in having another person in the room who may, they seem to feel, interfere with their process. In the case of the Austrian production, I pestered the director (whom I know) until he suggested that I visit them for a reading rehearsal with the playwright. Travel expenses, accommodation, and ticket for the opening are now part of my contract. Success.

The European Union supports international cultural exchange, mostly with mobility and exchange programs that bring together artists from more than two eligible countries, while national programs cover the support of domestic artists.

Cross-European funding

We can already see that my European colleagues and I largely depend on public funding, particularly programs that aim to support the independent arts community. While this sounds great, it often involves extensive administrative work for the application, the accounting, and the post-project reporting. I have the privilege of co-curating the literary translation festival translationale berlin 2025, for which we are currently busy preparing four funding applications for different programs on federal and state levels, as well as additional applications with international foundations like the Swiss Pro Helvetia and the Austrian Embassy. This means weeks and months of preparation even before any money is granted. Current severe budget cuts (due to war in Ukraine, military and transportation infrastructure maintenance, etc.) are particularly painful after a very lush situation during the years of the pandemic when the then commissioner for culture dished out a generous additional one billion Euros in the Neustart Kultur program to make a federal budget of 3.2 billion to keep us afloat. Now, we are looking at a total of 2.2 billion for 2025. That is a little more than the 2.15 billion allocated in 2024. Despite a higher overall budget, the federal funds (including the translators fund) expect budget cuts of 45 percent. This prospect has already thinned out programs, with fewer, smaller grants given.

In Germany, public funding schemes operate on every level of the democratic set-up: the national, the state, the commune. Living in a member state of the European Union (and the largest one, for that matter), I am also part of the European arts community. As a translator, I naturally deal with colleagues and theatremakers across the continent. Here, too, alliances are essential: the European Theatre Convention, the Fence, Eurodram, Fabulamundi (a large Creative Europe project), Out of the Wings Festival in London, Plateforme between France and Germany—there are so many connecting us across borders. Even though the European Union was founded as an alliance to secure economic market interests, it developed a cultural policy of its own. European Union monies are distributed to artists in Europe through various programs under one umbrella tool, Creative Europe, which has a budget of just over 350 million Euros for 2025. This goes to transnational arts projects in and around the European Union that are not covered by national programs, and it obviously plays into my personal interests as an artist to reach out and collaborate with artists.

Here is a European Union-funded project I am excited to be involved in: a French colleague specializing in multilingual theatre productions suggested that she and I apply for a touring program called Perform Europe that aims to bring productions from one Creative Europe country into at least two others. These include some non-European Union countries geographically located around the European Union. The general cultural policy of the European Union and its member states is based on fostering values like exchange, multilingual work, multiculturalism, and dialogue, with a basic understanding that these will promote democratic values and an inclusive and engaged democratic society where the culturally “other” is regarded as enriching one’s own. In that context, translation is a critical artistic instrument for the self-definition of democratic societies.

She approached a Tunisian company that produced the solo show of a Syrian actor, writer, and director who had, after somewhat of an odyssey, found some refuge in Tunisia; although he is working in his profession again, he is still at risk there when expressing his sexual orientation. His show is about all of this. She asked the team whether they would want to apply for Perform Europe with her organization Instant MIX Theater Lab and Drama Panorama. The plan for the project she masterminded is to bring their show to Berlin and Paris, experimenting on multilingual solutions by adding one local performer in each city. This theatrical experiment will, by its nature, involve at least Arabic, French, and German while we try out theatrical means of making the whole thing understood. In this project, I won’t even translate much but will think more about dramaturgical solutions for multilingual situations.

My point is that the European Union supports international cultural exchange, mostly with mobility and exchange programs that bring together artists from more than two eligible countries, while national programs cover the support of domestic artists (there are overlaps).

Where Are the American Plays?

Let us–for this context–take a special look at the transatlantic German-American relationship in theatre arts as the largest of my circles. For most of my career since the mid-nineties, I have been translating plays from US playwrights like Andrea M. Stolowitz, Jim Grimsley, Neil Simon, George Brant, Adam Rapp, and others. In recent years, I have hardly gotten any texts from the United States to translate anymore. There are probably several reasons, but conversations with agencies representing US playwrights confirmed what I read and saw in America: the discourse in the States has shifted, which also impacts theatrical writing, making it more specific in its reckoning with United States history by, for example, addressing civil rights issues and questions of identity. The works of splendid writers like Jeremy O. Harris or Suzan-Lori Parks speak to their US audience very specifically. As a consequence, the issues their plays tackle seem to resonate less with audiences in Europe. American plays become, figuratively speaking, less translatable.

Another more recent factor is, of course, that with the American theatre severely suffering, theatres closing, and programming being reduced, plays in the States become less visible—if they are written in the first place. I know playwrights who don’t write now (I hesitate to say “anymore”). Foreign agencies skimming festivals and award winners simply find fewer texts.

Whenever I speak with colleagues and playwrights in the United States, I understand that what is really lacking is the political will to recognize the essential significance and relevance of the arts, and maybe particularly translating in the arts, for societal self-understanding.

German theatremakers, on the other hand, have their own discourse to attend and their own audiences to cater to. In a Europe of many cultures, languages, and a rich continental diversity, with several wars going on next door, the stories across the nearest border are always close, relevant, and waiting to be heard—different languages notwithstanding. German audiences, too, love the great writing of Stijn Devillé from Belgium, Małgorzata Sikorska-Miszczuk’s surreal stories from Poland, Roman Sikora’s narratives of how capitalism devastates human souls in the Czech Republic; and audiences empathize with stories of war and refuge that continue to be part of the seasonal programming in European theatres. These stories are just strange enough to still relate—it is always European history or politics that connect us. It is therefore harder for specifically American stories to reach audiences in Germany and Europe.

Public Money for the Arts Builds Democracy

Here comes the hard part. I am sad to say that my own passionate ambitions of working with US artists and institutions have never been supported by the US side. As I’ve described, many other countries understand that it is profitable to spend money on making their culture and art known abroad. They entertain a network of cultural institutes across the globe, at least through their embassies. Not so the United States. Notoriously, international artistic collaborations, at least not in the realm I work in, fail to find funding partners or programs in the United States, which makes collaborations extremely difficult, if not impossible.

The outline of this series of essays mentions: “Not only is theatre in translation a powerful tool for cultural diplomacy, but also a unique opportunity to encounter global artists’ voices and perspectives within the comfort of one’s own local theatre.” I know we have to go further. Whenever I speak with colleagues and playwrights in the United States, I understand that what is really lacking is the political will to recognize the essential significance and relevance of the arts, and maybe particularly translating in the arts, for societal self-understanding. For any society, a communicative, dialogue-oriented understanding of the arts is essential to entertain its civil discourse and strengthen democratic values not only theoretically, but in the act, the very human act of connecting through artistic work. I know this because my collaboration and conversations with artists from Russia, Poland, France, Belarus, Kenya, South Africa, Bolivia, Chile, China, Australia, Canada, and many other places have not only fed directly into my understanding of how people live and think and work across the globe, but also made me understand how we in the performing arts, and particularly translators who project our findings into our own communities, can be Kulturmittler—cultural attachés below the radar of political diplomacy, satellites exploring beyond and often even contrary to official channels, bringing diverse stories and artists from around the world to our theatrical channels and local theatres.