Democratic translation: how the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize is changing publishing

The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and is delivering some of the most interesting new titles in English versions.

The French author Philippe Claudel, above, won The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2010 for his book Brodeck's Report, which was translated by John Cullen.

You join us at the Translation Centre, in the beating heart of the London Book Fair. It's not the best place to be in the middle of a volcano-induced transport crisis. Events with international authors stranded at home have been cancelled. Other writers have the bleary-eyed look of people who have been away for too long but have decided to, shall we say, make the most of their enforced holiday. In the middle of the maelstrom is Daniel Hahn, the literary translator, judge for The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2010 and chairman of the Translators Association. "Well, it's been interesting," he says, a glint in his eye. "But actually, I think the events have been more entertaining because they've been so off the cuff. And I've actually had the time to sit down and talk to people."

The hushed chatter around the unusually quiet London Book Fair is that "foreign" fiction translated into English has never been so high-profile. Undeniably, this is thanks to the late Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy (which began with The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo), currently standing at over 21 million copies sold worldwide. Roberto Bolano's 2666 has also been a huge success. And prizes such as The IFFP and events like April's Free The Word festival in London have thrust more and more books and authors from the non-English speaking world into the spotlight. As Hahn runs his finger down the shortlist, he mentions novels from Bengal, Germany, Congo, Italy and France.

"It's very pleasing to see Larsson's books do so well," he says. "First of all it's good for publishers to realise that just because a book is a translation from another language doesn't mean it's completely unsellable. But it's also changed perceptions of translations full stop. I suspect many people thought they were highbrow literary fiction. The vast majority still are, but now a Swedish crime novel is sold in exactly the same way as a Scottish or an American crime novel. Getting them "normalised", so there's not just a little corner of a bookstore with a translation section, is great for everyone."

Neither Larsson nor Bolano have appeared on the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize (IFFP) shortlists since its beginnings in 1990 - one of the necessary quirks of the rules is that the original writers have to be alive when the English version is published. "Otherwise you'd get a new translation of War and Peace in there, which is to miss the point of it all," points out Hahn. But while this year's shortlist might not have had a multimillion selling crime novel in its ranks, the likes of the Syrian-German Rafik Schami, whose nominated book The Dark Side of Love has been translated from German by Andrea Bell, is still a best-seller in its original language.

"The Dark Side of Love is a magnificent book, a monumental, enormous undertaking full of riches and stories about life in Damascus in the 20th century," enthuses Hahn. "There's something amazing about its mosaic quality, where the hundreds of little bits somehow come together to make this complete picture of Syria. It's an extraordinarily ambitious book but so well realised in terms of what it's trying to do. Bell has done a completely incredible job with it."

In the end, the prize went to Philippe Claudel's Brodeck's Report, translated by John Cullen. When I speak to Hahn again a few days after the awards, he's free of the burden of being impeccably fair to all the contenders. "It's a marvellously dark, terrifyingly lucid portrayal of evil born out of a little village," he says. "A masterpiece of control, really, both in the writing and the translation."

Still, the nominated books were, he tells me, all "within an inch of each other", so it's fair to assume The Dark Side Of Love came very close. Its publisher in the UK is Arabia Books, which is dedicated to "publishing the most exciting contemporary fiction from the Arabic world". And the 2010 longlist also featured three books translated from Arabic: The Madmen of Freedom Square by the Iraqi writer Hassan Blasim; Sunset Oasis by Bahaa Taher (for which the Egyptian won the inaugural International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2008), and Yalo by the Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury. Hahn also talks excitedly of a well-attended event in the translation centre which centred on translating Arabic for the English language market. Others might mention initiatives such as the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair and the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature, which have helped raise the profile of the regional literary community. It all points towards a greater awareness of fiction originating from the Middle East.

"Well, we're definitely getting better at being open to it," thinks Hahn. "Certainly in the last few years there have been quite a lot of bridges built between Arabic writing and English language publishing. I think part of the problem - and this isn't unique to Arabic - is that you need very good translators and publishers with a desire to discover these books and take a risk. If you have a lot of translators but not the publishing will, then all the translators will be unemployed, and if you have very keen publishers but not many very good translators, then the publishers aren't going to sell many books.

"Still, there are some very good Arabic to English translators - Humphrey Davies translated two books on the longlist - but not a lot. Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Publishing is working to improve matters, and develop the skills of translators. Next month I'm speaking at a conference in Qatar mainly focused on translators in the Arabic speaking world. There's definitely some forward motion. "But you're asking whether it's a fertile ground, and my problem is that I don't read Arabic, so I'm completely dependent, like most people in this room, on what actually makes it into English or perhaps French. I do keep being told, though, that there are some wonderful new writers in Arabic, and I absolutely believe there are more to be found."

Suddenly, we're interrupted by a delivery for Hahn. It's a parcel, and the look on his face is one of such delight, I can't help but be intrigued. He rips it open, revealing the proofs for a book he's been translating himself, The Piano Cemetery by the hot Portuguese novelist Jose Luis Peixoto. "This," he smiles as he pats the top of a thick pile of A4 paper, "is an absolutely gorgeous book. I can't wait for people to read it."

We'll have to wait until November for that, but such work means Hahn is uniquely placed to judge the IFFP and chair the Translators Association - particularly as he actually won (the £10,000 prize is shared between the author and the translator) in 2007 for Jose Eduardo Agualusa's The Book of Chameleons. There's just one final intriguing question though: what does he do when there's a passage of a book he's translating which he really doesn't like?

"Oh, it happens all the time," he laughs. "E-mail has made it very easy to say to a writer, for example: 'This joke at the end of chapter two is very funny, but it's not funny in English.' And in that case I would always suggest changing it in a specific way rather than leaving it out. Because the original author has two choices: either I persevere with the original, in which case no one will laugh, or we change the joke and keep the laugh.

"The job, essentially, is to recreate the experience of reading the book, not the specific sentences of the original. One of the advantages of working with most of the authors is that you get the permission to do just that - they trust you. And it's genuinely a lovely job: you're getting your head completely inside a book, and if that's a place it's exciting to be, that's a fantastic feeling. You're getting to write a great book even if you're not a great writer yourself."