On a Wednesday afternoon in March 2026, the translators Idra Novey and Ahmet Yıldız sat across from each other at a long oak table in the reading room of the New York Society Library and went through the third draft of a novel by the Turkish writer Sema Kaygusuz, page by page, for six hours.
Novey reads no Turkish. Yıldız translated the book from the Turkish into a literal English draft in late 2025. Novey is now turning that draft into a publishable English novel, with Yıldız at her elbow, defending the original where she pushes too far.
This is co-translation in its current American form, and it is becoming, quietly, the standard practice for languages that the English-language publishing industry has not yet figured out how to staff.
The arrangement is not new. Constance Garnett worked alone, but Edward Garnett edited her, and the Russian house was a four-handed operation. Gregory Rabassa and his wife sat side by side at his Hamilton Heights desk for thirty years. Edith Grossman has spoken about the importance of her in-house readers at her American publisher.
What is new is the visibility of the second translator's name on the title page.
Wolfgang Books in Brooklyn now credits both translators in equal type. New Directions does the same on roughly a third of its translations. Tilted Axis Press in London credits all collaborators, including a sensitivity reader on occasion, on the copyright page.
The model has critics. The translator Damion Searls, who works alone in seven languages, has argued in a 2024 essay that co-translation is a workaround for an industry that will not pay for the years it takes to learn a language properly. He has a point.
He is also outnumbered.
Yıldız, who is fifty-one and teaches comparative literature at Boğaziçi University, said his role in the partnership with Novey is to keep her honest. "She is the better English writer," he said. "I am the better Turkish reader. When she finds an image she likes more than mine, I tell her if it is still in the book."
Sometimes he tells her it is not.
On 18 March they spent forty minutes on a single paragraph in chapter eleven. The Turkish describes a woman watching her brother eat figs in their dead mother's kitchen. The verb Kaygusuz uses for the eating is unusual, somewhere between devouring and blessing. Novey's draft had tearing into. Yıldız thought tearing lost the reverence.
They settled on working through, which Novey then changed, in a fourth pass, to moving through. Yıldız accepted it. Kaygusuz, consulted by email, said she liked it better than her own.
Not all co-translations work this smoothly. The partnership between the Korean translators Anton Hur and Janet Hong on a 2023 collection by Bora Chung produced public disagreements about voice that ended with a co-authored translator's note explaining their divisions of labour.
Hong, in a follow-up essay in the Korea Literature Now quarterly, called the note "the most honest thing I have ever published." Hur, less generous, said the note was needed because their disagreements made the book stronger.
Both are still working.
The economics of co-translation are awkward. Most contracts split the translator fee evenly, which means each translator earns half of what a sole translator would for the same work. For Yıldız, who supplements his university salary, this is acceptable. For Novey, who lives in Brooklyn and translates full-time, it is a real cut.
Some presses have begun paying both translators a full fee. Charco Press in Edinburgh, which specialises in Latin American literature, did this for its 2025 edition of a Mapuche novel co-translated by Mariana Lardone and Robin Myers. The press calls it the only ethical model. The model also nearly bankrupted the press, and they have since walked it back to a 1.5x split.
What the practice produces is uneven. Co-translations can be flat where a single translator would have taken risks. They can also catch errors that a lone translator would have made, and they can preserve cultural specificity that a single English-language voice tends to smooth.
On the Kaygusuz novel, Yıldız caught a small mistranslation in chapter two that had been in the draft through three editorial passes. The Turkish verb for a particular kind of mourning ululation had been rendered, in Novey's first version, as singing. Yıldız changed it to keening, then to wailing without words, which is what Kaygusuz meant.
Novey said later she would never have arrived there alone.
At the end of the March session, the two translators packed their papers into separate bags and walked to a small Greek restaurant on East 79th Street for dinner. They did not talk about the book. They talked about Yıldız's daughter's university application and about a film Novey had seen the week before.
The book is due to the publisher in August. They have, by their own estimate, four more six-hour sessions to go.