3 nonfiction translations to read this spring

In March, Frank Wynne, the first translator to chair the International Booker Prize jury, issued a call for publishers to pay royalties to translators as well as authors — and the Booker Foundation instantly agreed.

Pro-translator advocacy of this sort has become increasingly frequent and visible, for which readers should be grateful. Well-paid, unconstrained translators choose a wider variety of projects, which means books arriving in English from a truly global range of languages, cultures, and traditions. It also means more kinds of books getting translated.

It's been a rare occasion that non-academic nonfiction has been translated into English. But that has begun to change. All three of the booksis a biography so unusual it hardly warrants the name; Silvia Ferrara's is a thorough early history — or, rather, histories — of written language; and Alia Trabucco Zerán's mixes legal history with a feminist reconstruction of four female murderers' lives.