"The harder you work, the lower the wage," says Karen Bates, a German translator, who has the same problem as his comrades.

"The wage is calculated based on the number of pages, not the time used for the translation," says Bates, a Chinese-Chinese expert who has translated 15 books over the past 10 years.

It took Bates three years to translate Liao Yifos's New Ant Birth, and it took more than a year to translate every part of the huge books of Chinese author Liu Zixin, famous for science fiction.

The translator loves her work. She also speaks Japanese, Spanish, Italian, English and French. “Working with language and culture, I found my message here a bit,” she says.

The German translator explains that she is improving her "sensitive career" with prize money, grants and additional work as well as translation. "Translators are intellectual property owners, but they are trampled by publishers under the wheels of printing costs, costs that publishers want to reduce as much as possible," Bates said.

On the sidelines of the opening of the Frankfurt International Book Fair this week, Norwegian writer Erika Fatland said: "Translators who are often ignored are the heroes of literature that I deal with every day."

The German Association of Translators of Literary and Scientific Works complains that translators are not paid enough or appreciated. The union has about 1,300 translators, not all of whom have enough life. A survey showed that the average annual income of a translator in Germany in 2017 and 2018 was less than 20,000 euros, about half the average income in Germany. Five years ago, the federation reached an agreement with publishing houses to regulate the wages of translators. The "basic wage" for the translation of the "normal page" was 19 euros, but not less than 15 euros, and no more than 23 euros per page for the particularly stressful translations.

But that is not the case. "It is the big companies, in particular, that are violating our right to adequate fees," said Kristel Kroning, a spokesman for the German Association of Translators of Literary and Scientific Works.

"We have a responsibility to the text and to the author," says the German translator, Bates, noting that readers and the publisher's role often do not know how much effort is being made in translation. "There are no literal translations. I don't translate the word.

The World Reading Theater Consortium seeks to illustrate this fuss to readers. During the Frankfurt International Book Fair, an event entitled “Translator Translator” is organized, during which translators work publicly in front of an audience to translate a text and discuss with the public about possible solutions.

Several awards have also contributed to improving the translators' “vision”, including the 20,000-euro Paul Ceylon prize awarded to Italian translator Annette Kubitski during the Frankfurt exhibition.

Karen Bates is a translator who likes to get out of the shadow of the author “for the public to see clearly”, where she used to read her translations from time to time to a public audience and to present cultural events.

- Bates, who speaks five languages, said: "It's hard to live on translation alone."

- «Translators are intellectual property .. Publishers want to reduce costs as much as possible».