When translator Deborah Smith took to the stage at the Man Booker International prize last week to share the honour — and the ￡50,000 award — with Han Kang, the South Korean author of The Vegetarian, the spotlight fell on a role that has traditionally been left in the shadows.

The lowly status of the translator was one factor behind the prize’s overhaul, which until last year was awarded only to the author.

Robert Chandler, whose English translations include works by Andrei Platonov, Vasily Grossman and Alexander Pushkin, believes that the arrogance of the English-speaking world has meant that translators are not valued as much as in other cultures, for example, in Russia. An indication of this is that translators’ names are frequently omitted from reviews. “That does upset us and rightly so,” Mr Chandler says. However, he detects a shift in the English-speaking world.