How do you find a literary translator you can trust?

I translate fiction into Czech, so let me flip it around for you. The single most important filter: your translator should be a native speaker of the TARGET language, not the source. People obsess over whether the person understands English perfectly, but the real skill is writing beautiful, natural prose in the language readers will actually hold in their hands. Ask whoever you're considering what their native language is and what they read for pleasure in it.

Ask for a paid sample translation of two or three pages from your own book, specifically a passage with dialogue and some voice to it, not a clean descriptive paragraph. Then find a trusted native reader of the target language to react to the sample blind, without telling them it's a translation. If they say it reads like it was written by a person who lives in that language, you're close.

Read their published translations. A literary translator worth hiring has a track record: books with their name on them, ideally in your genre. Get one of those books and have your target-language reader tell you if the prose sings. A crime thriller translator and a lyrical literary-fiction translator are not interchangeable, the same way you wouldn't swap those authors in English.

Check the professional associations. In the US there's the American Literary Translators Association, the UK has the Translators Association under the Society of Authors, and most countries have an equivalent. Membership isn't a guarantee of genius but it signals someone who treats this as a real profession, and the directories let you filter by language pair and genre.

Ask for references and actually call them. Two questions that reveal everything: did the translator hit deadlines, and how did they handle the parts of your book that don't translate cleanly? The second answer tells you whether they ask smart questions or just paper over problems silently.

If you have a publisher in the target territory, they often bring their own trusted translators, and that vetting is partly done for you. For self-published authors that safety net is gone, which is exactly why the paid sample plus blind reader matters so much. Don't skip it to save two hundred dollars.

One small warning from the buying side: be suspicious of anyone who quotes a price before seeing the manuscript or asking about the genre and length. Real translators want to read a chunk first, because a dense literary novel and a brisk YA book are completely different jobs even at the same word count.