Over a hundred participants at Bristol Translates literary translation summer school were glued to their screens and asked plenty of questions during an intense, hour-long session with Jane Seymour, who shared what she learned during decades of negotiations with publishers and film producers. Some of the seemingly simplest bits of advice struck a chord with participants who later said how encouraging they found the meeting: read your contract carefully, cultivate relationships with your counterparts, be confident but never cocky, negotiate your fee, but also things like timelines, payment terms, and copyright issues, and be prepared to walk away if minimum expectations aren’t met.

In conversation with Bristol Translates co-director Ros Schwartz, Seymour examined a whole host of personal experiences of translators who had shared their success and horror stories in the run-up to the meeting. Seymour explained the importance of meeting face to face, in person, and of explaining and trying to understand the position of the other side. Schwartz drew attention to the fact that many things that are intuitive to translators are completely opaque to others, even in the publishing industry, and need to be spelled out before an agreement can be reached.

Participants commented that contracts seemed much less like a black box now, and that would take to heart to of the key recommendations that Seymour and Schwartz and given them: don’t look at contracts as black and white, and be mindful that everything is negotiable.

Bristol Translates continued for one final day on Friday, with language workshops wrapping up their work and a feedback session in the afternoon.