Here’s Peter Bush, in his “The Writer of Translations,” on The Way Things Are for translators: they are dead; their names appear on “…the back flap [of books] as a bleak epitaph to the months of labour that selflessly, neutrally and most economically secreted the new spread of words.”
It is simply not true, as Bush implies, that the translator’s name is relegated to the back flap. In the English speaking world it is usually on the front page, along with the book’s title and the author’s name. The back flap is where you are most likely to find information about the author. And what does he mean by “selflessly”? Do translators not charge for their work? Why not?
Susan Bassnett and Peter Bush eds., The Translator as Writer
The offending article on Google Books