Rachel Cordasco’s essay on *finding* translated speculative fiction from February 2026 is a fascinating read, and consistent with my own observations of (and struggles with) finding speculative fiction in translation — because this is still an uphill battle. I had a lot of reactions as I read her essay, but the first points that sprang to my mind as I read it were related to the Internet Speculative Fiction Database, or ISFDB.
The Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDB)
Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a comprehensive site that cataloged metadata from all published speculative fiction translations? A place where you could go to search not only by author, but also by translator? The ISFDB is ostensibly a place where one might logically go to find such information. After all, it is “a community effort to catalog works of science fiction, fantasy, and horror” that links together bibliographic information, including author bibliographies and tables of contents for magazines and anthologies alike. I’ve contributed to various ISFDB records myself — and this hands-on experience has also opened my eyes to how easily ISFDB could dramatically help translated speculative fiction gain more visibility, and how doggedly the ISFDB admins refuse to do so.
Currently (as of March 9, 2026), ISFDB automatically creates profiles for writers, editors, poets, artists, publishers, and magazines when a user enters details of a book or magazine — but inexplicably, it does not create profiles for translators. I wish I could pull up a translator’s profile in ISFDB to see all the works they’ve translated, but the only way an SF translator gets a page in ISFDB is if they get published in some other capacity (as an author, artist, etc. — and there is no section for translations on those profile pages!). For example, several of my translations are documented in ISFDB, but none are visible on my ISFDB profile. This also means that, if I discover a translator I like, I can’t go find all their other translations in ISFDB with just a couple of clicks. I have to dig.
How ISFDB Presents Translations
One might assume that this simply means ISFDB doesn’t collect metadata about translations, but that would be incorrect because it does collect translation metadata. When creating a new ISFDB entry for a story or novel, one can indicate in the “Notes” field that a work is translated (and if so, by whom). ISFDB contains information about thousands of speculative translations, who translated them, and where to find them – but none of that information is displayed in a user-friendly format.
If you’d like to see an example of how ISFDB presents translators, take a look at the ISFDB entry for “Rat’s Tongue” by Xing Fan (translated by Judith Huang, published in 2022 by Future Science Fiction Digest) or my own translation of “Lamia” by Cristina Jurado (published in 2022 by Apex Magazine). You’ll note that while these stories link back to their corresponding author pages, there are no hyperlinks to pages for the translators.
Take a look at these author pages for Stanislaw Lem and Liu Cixin. You’ll notice that ISFDB clearly marks instances where these authors’ works have been translated to other languages (including each language, when, and in which publications) — and yet, the translators remain anonymous. For some stories, you can click through and find the translators’ names in that little “notes” field, but some translators remain unidentified (which could be due to contributing users not taking the steps to name the translator, or simply because the original publisher never even credited the translator).
Now, just imagine how much easier it would be to find more translations by a specific translator if they were clearly identified on those author profile pages, and how much easier still it would be browse that translator’s work if ISFDB allowed translators to have profile pages, too! And imagine how much more nuanced our discussions of translated speculative fiction could be if ISFDB allowed translations performed by authors to appear on those authors’ pages!
ISFDB’s Guidance for Submitting Translations
I’ve mentioned ISFDB not “allowing” translators to be properly indexed in the database – “allowing” is indeed the correct word choice. I’d like to call your attention to ISFDB’s FAQ guidance users for entering translations into the database — the guidance requires you to log in, so I will excerpt some key quotes for you in the paragraphs below.
The general rules and information for entering translations are rather straightforward: all titles must have a language field, and translated titles are entered as variants of the title in its original language. Users are specifically required to identify the translation language AND use the original non-Latin characters for the author and/or translator names when those names are written using systems like Chinese characters or the Cyrillic alphabet.
ISFDB’s translation guidance also directs users, “Ideally, the Note to Moderator [field] should include the information that this is a translation and the Title of the original publication that it was originally translated from.” Specifically naming the translator for a given translation is mandatory “if it is a translation and you know the name of the translator”.
However, these same FAQ and guiding rules explicitly state (and have stated for many years): “There is currently no support for a ‘translated by’ field in the [ISFDB] database. Translators should be recorded in each Title’s Notes field.”
No “Translated by” Field?
Why doesn’t ISFDB support a “translated by” field?
The ISFDB site appears pretty straightforward, and it seems to me that the admins could make a few behind-the-scenes tweaks that would make these changes possible (particularly given how responsive admins of other sites, like The Submission Grinder, are to user suggestions). I am not sure how complicated the back-end of ISFDB actually is, but I suspect that it can’t be that much more complicated than The Submission Grinder’s back-end, and The Submission Grinder regularly adds new fields and filters based on user suggestions.
Perhaps one of the things dissuading the ISFDB administrators from adding this field is the daunting task of having to go back through and help update records to ensure translator information is properly indexed and recorded. I would argue this logic does not hold up to scrutiny, because interest specifically in translated speculative fiction has grown astronomically over the past decade, and I think ISFDB will find no shortage of users interested in tackling this challenge.
It kills me that ISFDB doesn’t allow profiles for translators. Unfortunately, translators remain next-to-invisible in the database, and this seems very unlikely to change in the near future unless the ISFDB admins concede and add a “translated by” field.
Nevertheless, I still hold out hope that there will someday be enough of us clamoring for change that ISFDB will finally add that “translated by” field — or that we’ll be able to build our own ISFDB knock-off for #SFinTranslation.
