How long is fifty years? Picture rotary telephones, cut-glass ashtrays, books and journals piled alongside stacks of typescripts… It was just yesterday; it was another world.

Acts of Parliament, cereal boxes

The 1969 Official Languages Act ushered in a massive expansion of translation in Canada. New and growing universities added translation programs ¹ to serve the needs of an officially bilingual state, while translation studies and literary translation slipped into the academy through the side door. ² And the energy of a vital counterculture spawned new presses unafraid to take risks on experimental poetry and prose, including many works in translation.³

       Surely the architects of official bilingualism did not foresee that food labelling laws would lead to generations of children staring at the French on their cereal boxes, or that in more than one this would plant a seed of fascination that would bloom into a vocation for translation. ⁴

Becoming translators

Many translators credit an inspiring teacher for setting them down the course that shaped their life’s work.⁵ Others grew up in bilingual or multilingual households, juggling languages from childhood ⁶ The story often begins with a variation of a friend asked me to help translate something⁷ or when political action creates a need for translation that develops into vocation ⁸ Some consciously chose to become literary translators and pursued this goal through formal education; many learned their craft as commercial translators while harbouring dreams of literary pursuits; almost always, some combination of the above is woven through the stories of how Canada’s translators fell into their profession.⁹

Waves and currents

In the 1960s and 1970s, interest in translation grew in tandem with concern over Canadian national identity, often conceived in opposition to Quebec nationalism. The importance of translators’ work and even the quality of their translations was often judged by related standards: how faithful were their representations of Quebec identity? How did their work contribute to the project of national identity and intercultural understanding?¹⁰

       Other movements followed. A strong current of feminist writing in the 1970s and 1980s represents a moment of exceptional convergence where the work of French and Quebecoise feminist writers, in translation, reshaped experimental original writing in English nationwide. Translator/creators were at the centre of a fertile ecosystem of journals, conferences, and books.¹¹

       As time passed, other currents have swept through the discipline. Postcolonial approaches have reshaped translation practice, and an ever-growing presence of writing and storytelling by First Nations, Inuit, and Metis creators has begun to be carried across language barriers through translation.

One part of an ecosystem

A first lesson literary translators learn is that we are a small part of a large ecosystem. On its way to the reader, every work passes through the hands of cover designers, publicists, editors, reviewers, and booksellers. Publishers are the linchpins, but as translators we an important link interacting with everyone along the chain.¹²

       Looking beyond French to English literary translation in Canada,¹³ many point to an upsurge in attention paid to translated literature internationally, with new prizes, enhanced recognition of books’ translated status, and even the idea of translated literature as a genre.¹⁴ Translators’ names increasingly appear on book covers, and our work as conduits between literatures of different languages and nations no longer goes unnoticed.¹⁵

       Every August, for Women in Translation Month, bookstores nationwide curate displays to celebrate and promote the work of women authors and translators. And booksellers, that final link in the chain, are celebrating and promoting translated literature.¹⁶

Wherever two or three are gathered

Virtually every translator interviewed for this article described life-changing personal encounters, both spontaneous and organized, that helped them find their way in the profession, hone their craft, and do the essential networking that gets books into the hands of translators, publishers, and readers.¹⁷

       In the pre-Zoom, pre-pandemic world of the last fifty years, international conferences or retreats were the cornerstone of individual and community development in both literary translation and translation studies.

       We may live in a different world now. Yet there are constants, like the way those translating and publishing literatures from outside Canada somehow forge on through sheer willpower and love-much as it happened between French and English fifty years ago.¹⁸

Coda

In a heatwave in late summer 2025, my family and I went to Baie-Saint-Paul to spend a day by a slow-flowing river. With my legs in the shallow waters, I read River in an Ocean: Essays on Translation,¹⁹ listening to the rustling of trees and watching people old and young arrive with their dogs and their picnics.

       “What, and where, is the time and place of literary translation?” As this question flowed over me, more and more people around us obeyed an ancient impulse to find a source of water to cool down.

       Now, we have more efficient ways to do this. There is air conditioning; there are swimming pools. Yet still we come back to the same rivers. From elders to small children to dogs and birds, it felt as if we all knew exactly what to do, here. As the river washed over my feet, I sensed that it was somehow the same for translation, which undergoes radical transformations while stubbornly following the same well-worn paths. It seems foolish to predict the future. But every translator I spoke with voiced optimism. Time will tell.