List of Accepted Sessions for ALTA49

By exploring what the prose poem gives to various literary traditions and what needs to be taken from them in order to accommodate the form, this panel will explore the question of the translation of the prose poem. It will offer concrete examples of the types of translation called for by each linguistic tradition.

Moderator: Brandon Menke

Panelists: Miharu Yano, Stine An, Janet Hendrickson, Heather Green

This panel discusses the ethical and translatorial challenges posed by the translation of scholarship in the Humanities and Social Sciences and as an approach to translation determined by the venue in which the translation will appear. The panel opens with Sean Cotter’s discussion of the give and take of ideas in academic translation, followed by Trask Roberts’ presentation on the challenges of translating translation theory. Cassio de Oliveira then addresses the issue of back-translating Huckleberry Finn’s Russian and Ukrainian translations for an academic readership, while Teresa Villa-Ignacio discusses the challenges of navigating the interplay of feminism, economics, and diverse readerships in her translation of Pauline Grosjean’s Patriarcapitalisme.

Moderator: Teresa Villa-Ignacio

Panelists: Sean Cotter, Trask Roberts, Cassio de Oliveira

The vocabulary of fruit is a topic ripe with challenges for the translator. Fruits can be embedded in culinary traditions, their uses rich with cultural context. The same fruits that appear unfamiliar to some readers may be intimately intertwined with the landscapes and idioms of texts in a different language. And, as commodities, fruits do not just conjure familiarity but can also be charged with associations of the exotic and the other. This panel brings together translators who have navigated literary texts laden with produce. From scenes of local flora to the puzzle of a fruit pun, the translation of fruit yields reflections on the larger questions of when to translate—or not translate—the hyper-local and how to balance cultural precision with context and humor.

Moderator: Lara Norgaard

Panelists: Jess Jensen Mitchell, Kotryna Garanasvili, Thomas Mira y Lopez, Thuý Đinh

Our interactive panel will showcase our Indianapolis-based translation collective—a bimonthly workshop group that offers rich, language-neutral feedback. The differences in our languages, sensibilities, genres, and flight hours in translation make for reciprocity as well as for equitable exchange. We have brought in first drafts, texts we’re finetuning for journal publication, and grant or book proposals. The group dynamic provides something that individual critique can’t: we toss out ideas and riff on them collectively. The synergy of our arrangement—truly a give and take—goes beyond mere editing. It inspires, renews, and sustains us. And we’d like to hear about your strategies for working against the solitariness of translation, too.

Moderator: Karen Kovacik

Panelists: Anne O. Fisher, Laura Nagle, Peera Songkünnatham

Through the lens of this year’s conference theme, this panel will discuss the more equitable, inclusive, diverse, and sustainable literary world we want with an intentionally practical mindset: of the things we want for translation’s future, what could we build ourselves, what would we need to do so, and what could we learn from each other’s trials and errors? Combining experiences of translators who’ve worked to build their own magazines, presses, reading series, translator networks, and other resources, we ask: what does the world of literary translation we’d like to have look like, and what can we do together to get closer to those goals? We hope for a lively discussion between panelists and attendees for us all to leave with a wide range of ideas to take back to our home communities.

Moderator: Jeremy Michael Reed

Panelists: Yvette Neisser, Jenny Bhatt, Rachel Martin, Dennis Maloney

What is language’s relationship to “home” and what happens when that relationship becomes fraught and distanced? If this distance constitutes part of a text’s meaning, how should a translator engage that aspect? Does translation itself augment or transform this distance? This panel considers approaches to translating works about and from exile. Panelists will discuss their experience translating these texts, the decisions they made and what these works can teach us about the relationship between place, language, and translation. As a topic that often concern’s the writers life, these questions brush against larger methodological and historical questions: How much role does biography play in translation? What is the translator’s responsibility to the writer’s situation?

Moderator: Adam Ray Wagner

Panelists: M.L. Martin, Matvei Yankelevich, Joshua Thermidor, Deborah Woodard

What does literary translation preserve that historical accounts alone cannot? This panel considers translation as a counter-archival practice, returning to texts, identities, perspectives, and timelines that remain in complicated relation to official memory. Focusing on Vietnamese literature across colonial and war-era writing, socialist institutions, diasporic criticism, and contemporary fiction, we ask how translation around Vietnamese can reanimate literary lives and afterlives. As translators, editors, and critics, panelists will reflect on how translating, editing, and anthologizing create ethical forms of historical knowledge that exceed the limits of archival accounts, and on how translation opens new avenues for Vietnamese literature to be made historically alive.

Moderator: Camellia Pham

Panelists: Thuý Đinh, Ally Le, Đỗ-Quyên Phó, Uyen T. Nguyen

Across the Sinophone world, Mandarin has been cemented largely as the standard language of education, commerce, daily communication and literature, despite the immense linguistic diversity that has long predated it. Meanwhile, minority Chinese languages like Cantonese, Taishanese, Hokkien, Hakka, and Teochew, which Mandarin has displaced, face an uncertain future in the places where they are still spoken. This panel will discuss such questions as: what are the unique challenges of translating from non-Mandarin Sinitic languages, how does the situation vary across the Chinese diaspora, and how could the future look for Sinitic languages in English translation? Join the conversation as we discuss the future of these “dying dialects” in translation.

Moderator: Cheryl Ong

Panelists: Chris Fong Chew, Fion Tse, Violet Law, April Faison

We will discuss the unique challenges of translating South Asian poetry, which has received comparatively less attention than fiction in recent years. The panel will particularly focus on questions of form. When translating poetry into English, is it important, or even desirable, to keep the original form intact? Can we convey the meters, rhymes, and structural units of one language in another? How do histories of colonialism determine these exchanges? Are there reciprocal forms in English and Asian poetic traditions? How do translators reconfigure forms or invent new ones? We will discuss different South Asian languages and poetic styles (from Tamil to Nepali, ghazals to Sufi songs) as well as talk generally about translating the formal qualities of a poem.

Moderator: Haider Shahbaz

Panelists: Vivek Narayanan, Sadia Khatri, Rohan Chhetri, Javeria Hasnain

Exophonic writers write in languages other than their first, inhabiting linguistic and cultural spaces that challenge conventional notions of fluency, authority, and belonging. How do exophonic texts negotiate cultural distance and intimacy, and how do they handle asymmetry between languages and their cultural stores? What strategies do writers develop when working across linguistic boundaries, and how might these inform translation practices? How do we translate an original work with multiple linguistic influences or a work that is a cultural hybrid? Panelists will examine exophony as a model of reciprocal exchange, considering how translators engage in linguistic difference as a productive space for creativity, ethics, and sustainable cross-cultural dialogue.

Moderator: Alan Reiser

Panelists: Cynthia Shin, Cooper Gerrard, Susan Bernofsky, Rebecca Weingart

Presenters will address a variety of issues, particularly those around sexual identity. Slavic languages have three grammatical genders (feminine, masculine, and neuter), expressed in past-tense verb forms, adjectives and nouns; the tripartite distinction may appear in plural forms; dual forms can identify a couple. Past-tense forms economically identify the speaker and (where singular) the addressee, underlining past action and experience as what forms a personality, while new forms are being created both to identify women’s professions (feminitives) and to express non-binary identity. How can these elements be rendered in English, which has such different resources? The session will draw on examples from Croatian, Czech, Polish, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovene and Ukrainian.

Moderator: Bita Takrimi

Panelists: Peter Burzyński, Martha Kosir, Marianna Suleymanova

Presenters will discuss their findings in Romance and other languages: Catalan, Finnish, French, German, Portuguese, and Spanish. Finnish has no grammatical gender, though English translations can sometimes simplify the wording needed to express which character is acting. German, like the Slavic languages, has three genders. Romance languages have two grammatical genders: feminine and masculine, and in these languages too the translator must work to convey mystery as well as distinct or novel expressions of identity in English, with its different and sometimes more limited resources.

Moderator: Jamie Rising

Panelists: AKaiser, Silvia Kofler, Martha Kosir, Lola Rogers

This panel will explore the collaborative model of translation groups as a dynamic embodiment of “give and take”. It will discuss how various groups (the Boston Area Literary Translators Group, the Tucson Translation Circle, the Third Coast Translators Collective, and the Literary Special Interest Group of the Austin Area Translators and Interpreters Association) got started, how they work in practice, and the conditions that have contributed to their success. Panelists will offer reflections on how the groups have enhanced the quality of their translations and shaped their individual practices and professional development, in the hopes of encouraging others to form their own translation circles.

Moderator: Linda Worrell

Panelists: Leigh Donovan, Jamie Rising, Mark Schafer, Jim Kates

What does it mean to build a life as both a poet and a translator—and what does that dual practice make possible? This panel brings together poet-translators with particular interests and experience in engaging translation to identify, challenge, and reimagine the colonial and heteronormative assumptions embedded in dominant publishing structures. Moving beyond textual publication alone, panelists discuss how giving and taking across linguistic, temporal, and cultural borders can queer traditional hierarchies, challenge the Anglosphere’s gatekeeping, and resist the smoothing over of difference, while imagining and practicing translation as a liberating commons for radical or reciprocal exchange, co-creation, and literary world-making.

Moderator: Stine An

Panelists: Sawako Nakayasu, E.R. Pulgar, Joshua Thermidor, Vyxz Vasquez

Erotic texts often elicit powerful, seemingly contradictory feelings of shame and exhilaration. And yet, although the sensual and the risqué are a part of our daily lives, it is a subject that has been little discussed as part of our practice as translators. In this panel, translators from different linguistic traditions cast off their inhibitions to frankly discuss their experiences crafting allure while fighting repulsion, handling awkward author encounters, and reconciling intimacy with industry. We will also undress issues of coded language, performance and embodied desire, the ethics and challenges of translating taboo, and the restraints and opportunities of genre. Time will be set aside for audience discussion and for translators to read from their most… stimulating work.

Moderator: Sebastian Schulman

Panelists: Ellen Vayner, Shelley Fairweather-Vega, Bonnie Chau, 

While English-language translation of East Asian literature was once primarily the domain of the white academic, the landscape has evolved and diversified in recent years. For “heritage” translators who work with languages connected to their family background, this creative practice is often mediated through the give and take of a personal cultural identity that is never fully fixed. This panel will center the notion of ambiguity and ambivalence as it relates to the participants’ paths to becoming translators. Through open conversation, we will explore what forces or circumstances nurtured, diminished, or otherwise influenced the panelists’ capacity to engage with a heritage language or culture and how their respective geographical and professional contexts continue to shape their work.

Moderator: Mike Fu

Panelists: Yuki Tejima, Jeremy Tiang, Grace En-Yi Ting, Asa Yoneda

Open a children’s book—you’ll find profound worlds in a page turn, a touch of mischief, a word and a picture leaning on each other. Translators from Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, Chinese, Russian, French, Italian, German, Spanish, and Portuguese share happy headaches across picture books, poems, diaries, middle grade, YA, and graphic novels. As readers of the page, of children, and of each other’s childhoods, what do we adapt in translation and what do we trust young readers to handle? How do our encounters with children in classrooms and communities nourish our work, and vice versa? What barriers face each language pair, and what industry practices do we advocate for? Come discover how much a small book can give and ask of us in return. Maybe you’ll pick one up yourself and even translate it!

Moderator: Hongyu Jasmine Zhu

Panelists: Riya Parikh, Nanette McGuinness, Lena Traer, Lyn Miller-Lachmann

Theater translation is a communal practice that occupies rehearsal rooms, stages, festivals, and more. How does a theater translator interact with playwrights, dramaturgs, designers, actors, audiences, and critics? What happens when a theater translator also inhabits those roles? This panel opens up conversation on topics such as how to start translating theater, various translation methods (e.g., co- and community translation), working with theater artists on the page and in rehearsal, reviewing and critiquing translated/multilingual theater, navigating and networking at local and international theater festivals, and how translating theater can also bolster one’s artistic and creative practice.

Moderator: Amanda L. Andrei

Panelists: Aureen Almario, Jeremy Tiang, Karin Rosnizeck, Lizzie Fox

Every translation project is built on trust and based around a complex web of relationships—but what makes these relationships editorially and creatively sustainable? Beyond pitching, how do editors pursue and shape projects while collaborating with translators, authors, and publishers? What ethical considerations foster respectful and reciprocal partnerships? Bringing together editors from Big Five publishers to independent and small presses, this panel explores editorial compatibility, linguistic and cultural sensitivities, professional boundaries, and platforming voices from minority languages and marginalized cultures. Panelists will also share how translators and editors can cultivate relationships grounded in care, transparency, curiosity and mutual respect.

Moderator: Jenna Tang

Panelists: Alexa Frank, Sarah Coolidge, Laura Cesarco Eglin, Daniel Owen

In the natural world, conscientious methods of intervention and harvesting create space for life to replenish and thrive as opposed to being left alone. Translation is inherently an act of intervention, but we can choose reciprocity in the process. We can ask others what literature is meaningful to them and should be translated. We can question our own translational goals if they run counter to what the work wants to express. We can intervene to educate an audience, create a glossary, or open up new possibilities with retranslation. This panel, predicated on the belief that intervention within translation allows our texts to flourish, features translators from Spanish, Russian, Bangla, and Indonesian, for each of which intervention may look different.

Moderator: Antoinette Goodrich

Panelists: Daria Shchukina, Noora Shamsi Bahar, Lara Norgaard, Liz Evans Weber

This panel will explore the challenges and rewards of translating works by deceased authors. In particular, panelists will discuss their experiences bringing previously untranslated works to publishers’ attention and taking these projects from conception to completion. How does one begin seeking out neglected voices from generations and centuries past? How can a translator identify the heirs to a literary estate? How do we pitch the work of deceased authors to current publishers in ways that can appeal to the broadest possible share of an already limited market? How can we work to expand the canon while being mindful of the specificity and importance of each writer’s singular voice? How do we navigate questions about the source text, given the impossibility of contacting the author?

Moderator: Laura Nagle

Panelists: Yermiyahu Ahron Taub, Ted Dodson, Etkin Hanson, Jeannine M. Pitas

As poets, we often write from our own world; things we have lived and felt and seen. In translation, we have just the smallest window into the world of the poem and have to step off a cliff into the unknown. How do our own perspectives shape how we approach translating a given poem? How does this change with collaborative translation when there are two translators, when there are multiple translations, or when translating in conversation with a living poet? This panel investigates the flexibility various forms of collaboration offer; highlights how different approaches can be reciprocal; and offers poetic solutions to the challenges, omissions, and changes that arise in translating poems.

Moderator: Judy Halebsky

Panelists: Amanda Moore, Dean Rader, Ayako Takahashi, Dora Prieto

What is the Latin American neo-avant-garde and what challenges arise when translating and publishing the poetry of this influential generation? This panel examines a pioneering yet often overlooked group of poets who began publishing in the late 1950s. Known as conversacionalistas, they forged a distinctive language grounded in orality and shaped by the vocabularies of the social sciences and mass media. Their work broke new ground by bringing socially engaged content into dialogue with experimental forms, embracing elements of popular culture, and imagining the reader as an active collaborator. Such approaches resist the dominant aesthetic expectation in Latin American poetry that poets align themselves with one pole of an apparent binary—revolutionary commitment or formal conservatism.

Moderator: Katherine M. Hedeen

Panelists: Steve Halle, Ted Dodson, Jeannine Pitas

This panel concerns fidelity across unequal value systems, when translation removes a work from the local conditions that first conferred its significance. Isabelle will focus on the Azerbaijani novella Bahadır and Sona, recently reissued in Azerbaijan’s “miniKlassika” series alongside authors like Tolstoy, and investigate how a text regarded as foundational may become “minor” within the Anglophone literary field. Doğa will discuss Lale Müldür’s Divanü Lûgat-it-Türk, a postmodern prose poem that reinterprets Kaşgarlı Mahmud’s dictionary and raises questions about Turkic history, mythology, and archaisms previously attributed to nationalist poetry. Ritambhara will discuss the Hindi literary scene, where the ghazal, film lyric, and other sentimental forms serve as objects of canon formation.

Moderator: Doga Ayar

Panelists: Ritambhara Shrivastava, Isabelle Anne Davis

Nordic literature and its writers are more complicated than the popular fiction that makes the biggest splash in the Anglosphere. Depending on whom you ask, Nordic languages include the three closely related yet imperially entangled sister languages, Danish, Norwegian and Swedish, but also Icelandic, Sámi, Faroese, Finnish and Greenlandic. The population, too, is more diverse and thorny than many realize. Denmark has a record number of South Korean adoptees, eight of whom are currently suing the Danish government over alleged violations linked to international adoption, and many of whom write in Danish. Whether it’s a publisher assuming Norwegian and Greenlandic are comparable, or readers expecting noir by white writers, the reality of Nordic literature is richer and more complicated.

Moderator: Sharon Rhodes

Panelists: Tabatha Leggett, Jordan Barger, Gina Abelkop, Paul Norlen

Devotion–profound dedication to a cause, person, or entity–is a powerful philosophy undergirding the practice of translation. Just as translation is an act of deep interpretation and care, so is the translator’s connection with the original author and their text. The connection forged by translation invariably leaves traces of the original author’s artistry on the translator’s own aesthetic practices, allowing mysterious, revelatory connections to arise for translator. In this panel, each translator will describe how they attend to their work through a variety of esoteric methods including divination (e.g., tarot, astrology), honoring the otherworldly (as inspired by shamans, oracles, ancestors), as well as how the perspective of devotion enhances their translation and creative practices.

Moderator: Diana Arterian

Panelists: Amanda L. Andrei, Jack Saebyok Jung, Óscar Moisés Díaz, Noelle de la Paz

This session proposes Hong Kong as a crucial translational hub where exiled and local intellectuals reshaped global discourses of freedom, resistance, and decolonization through their work as translators, editors, and small-press publishers from the early Cold War into the postcolonial era. Focusing on four case studies from the 1950s to the 1980s, the panel foregrounds translators’ agency within—and against—powerful institutional frameworks: U.S. cultural diplomacy, anticommunist and communist propaganda networks, colonial censorship, and emerging decolonial coalitions. It argues that translation in Hong Kong did not simply transmit pre-formed ideas across languages; it actively negotiated, redirected, and sometimes unintentionally reinforced global narratives of emancipation.

Moderator: Ruoze Huang

Panelists: Yunrou LIU, Hanjin Yan, Yifei LIU

Being a creative working parent is a constant balancing act between the demands of family obligations and professional responsibilities, between raising good humans and making good art and just trying to survive. But there are other ways of seeing this give-and-take: Is parenting what we give, or does it take our energy? Is translation a gift to our community, or us selfishly taking time for ourselves? Speaking from their own experiences across the spectrum of work experience, translation practices, and stages of their children’s ages and development, participants will discuss and share how they (try to) make it work, from the day-to-day household logistics and what language(s) we speak at home to the deeper consideration of how the practices of translation and parenting affect each other.

Moderator: Allison M. Charette

Panelists: Sebastian Schulman, Mordecai Martin, Elisabeth Jaquette, Hilary Kaplan

This panel asks, how does a translator handle novel uses of language which intend to challenge, disorient, and destabilize the reader? How can a translator render, for example, politically charged language? Or, lexical inventions entangled with loaded connotations? How do translators make space in the target language for such intentional creative irregularities? This panel is especially interested in the linguistic acrobatics related to gender-neutral or intentionally feminized speech, activist linguistic reclamations, and unexpected images or word-play. Panelists will discuss the challenges and potential opportunities for creative linguistic turbulence that they have found / are finding as they translate feminist poets from Bolivia, Poland, France and Germany.

Moderator: Jeffrey Diteman

Panelists: Kiley Karlak Malloy, Ilse Meiler, Lynette Yetter, Karen Holmberg

How does one translate rhyme? The echo of a homophone? An image rooted in word play or cultural association? In A Journey with Two Maps, Eavan Boland writes that translation is “in many ways the conversation that does not fail; the encounter that cannot be lost.” In this discussion, the panelists consider what opportunities for creative reciprocity emerge in an encounter with another poet through translation. Bringing perspectives from the translation of Finnish-Swedish, Korean, Old English, and Indonesian poetry, the translators discuss how their own prosodic sensibilities guide the work of, as Martin puts it, “releasing the poem into radical complexity” when bringing it into English. What we might, as poets, give and take.

Moderator: Miriam Åkervall

Panelists: CD Eskilsson, Jack Saebyok Jung, M.L. Martin, Daniel Owen

This celebration gathers translators of Kim Myeong-sun (1896-1954): Korea’s first published woman writer, a survivor of sexual violence and Japanese colonialism, and an unsung innovator of Korean verse and fiction. Panelists will discuss the challenges and joys of reviving Kim Myeong-sun’s work for both Korean and English readerships. South Korean poet Park Soran and editor Kim Seonyoung will discuss their co-translation of five books by Kim Myeong-sun from archaic to modern Korean, and the conversations, discussions, and the tug-and-pull within the process. Eunice Lee will present her translations in FRUIT OF LIFE (Rutgers UP, 2026), the first book-length English translation of Kim Myeong-sun’s poetry. This event is sponsored by LTI Korea.

Moderator: Min Ji Choi

Panelists: Park Soran, Kim Seonyoung, Eunice Lee

Rolando Cárdenas is a Chilean poet who was a contemporary of Jorge Tellier and Roberto Bolaño and whose work was all but lost in the authoritarian scouring of the Pinochet regime. This panel will bring together editors, translators, and critics of a recent volume of Cárdenas’s work to discuss the process of bringing this remarkable poet to a contemporary audience after a near complete erasure. The book, which received a starred review from Booklist, presents a body of Cárdenas’ work for the first time in English, translated by several accomplished translators each with their own approach to his work and theory of translation. This panel will appeal to those interested in poetry, comparative literature, translation theory, and South American literature.

Moderator: Martin Rock

Panelists: July Westhale, Julia Guez, Felipe Acevedo Riquelme, Mathew Weitman

SEEKING PARTICIPANTS

Contemporary Romanian writing and translation provides insight into the changing parameters of translation. If earlier ideas of a closed-off Eastern Europe encouraged us to think of translation as the extraction of literary value from a far-away place, the past two decades have re-oriented the geography toward reciprocal exchange, as writers and translators travel, collaborate, and create across linguistic difference. As a smaller country, Romania registers more clearly the new situation for cultural creation. This panel will explore the ways in which Romania has become the site of give-and-take in cultural terms, exploring the theme through autobiography, born-translated literature, and exophony.

Moderator: Sean Cotter

Panelists: Clara Burghelea, Monica Cure

Contact: Sean Cotter, sean.cotter@utdallas.edu

This year’s conference theme fittingly describes what happens when seasoned translators come together to share their translation for the first time in SLAM or spoken word format. This year’s slam will celebrate the 50th anniversary of Guillermo Cabrera Infante’s Exorcismos de esti(l)o through our transmutations of Cuban Spanish into English. We aim to preserve the poetic qualities of this parodic text as well as highlight it’s cultural nuances. Previous “River-Plate” slams have been extremely successful. The first slam was devoted to a Borges ultraist manifesto from the 1920s; the second to Silvia Molloy’s Desarticulaciones, and a third to Angelica Gorodischer’s text Historia de mi madre. Each of these texts presented unique challenges and resulted in lively audience participation.

Moderator: Jill Gibian

Panelists: Suzanne Jill Levine, Lisa Rose Bradford, Jessica Powell, Eduardo Aparicio

Have you been curious about the union for literary translators? Come find out more! The Literary Translators Division, a newly formed branch of the National Writers Union, is building collective power among translators as workers. This panel will explain each of our working groups and share some of our current projects, including our Unilateral Announcements initiative, our Rate-Sharing Tool, and our Solidarity Drop-Ins. This panel will also feature a “translator’s water-cooler” activity in which we’ll consider some of the most pressing issues facing working translators today. You’ll make new friends, discuss topics such as pay, AI, cover credits, and more, and collaborate with fellow translators to envision ways to create a better world. The time for solidarity is now!

Moderator: Allana Lieberman

Panelists: Frances Riddle, Mayada Ibrahim, Sharon Rhodes

The panel will discuss contemporary literature for children, teens, and young adults, drawing on prose texts collected in _A Hundred Years of Childhood: An Anthology of Russian Writing for Children, 1917–2017_ and _Coming of Age in a Complicated Century: An Anthology of Russian Writing for Teens, 1917–2017_ (both edited by O. Bukhina, K. Herold, and A. Lanoux), as well as in other publications, such as _Pioneer Summer_. Anglophone children’s and teens’ books are well known to Russian-speaking audiences, but their counterparts remain unfamiliar in the English-speaking world. The participants will discuss considerations involved in translating for children, teens, and young adults, as well as the choices translators make when the target readership may differ from that of the source text.

Moderator: Marian Schwartz

Panelists: Olga Bukhina, Anne O. Fisher, Jamie Olson

The panel will present three anthologies: Firefly in a Box: An Anthology of Soviet Kid Lit (edited by A. Krushelnitskaya and D. Manin); A Hundred Years of Childhood: An Anthology of Russian Writing for Children, 1917–2017; and Coming of Age in a Complicated Century: An Anthology of Russian Writing for Teens, 1917–2017 (both edited by O. Bukhina, K. Herold, and A. Lanoux). Taking the very best from the other culture, these anthologies present examples of Soviet and contemporary Russian children’s poetry, many of them in English for the first time. The participants will discuss how translators work with rhyme, rhythm, and meter, as well as the importance of these elements in Russian children’s poetry, including the song-like quality of poems for very young children.

Moderator: Anastasia Kostetskaya

Panelists: Dmitri Manin, Sibelan Forrester, Anna Krushelnitskaya

The U.S. undergraduate population is increasingly bilingual, as heritage speakers and international students have reshaped the language diversity on college campuses. In response, the core or general education curriculum has emerged as an opportune place to engage students for whom translation is not an object of academic study but a fact of life. This panel will consider how we might approach “give and take” in teaching translation: what translation offers students across different majors; how multidisciplinary teaching tools can inform our own translation practices; and how foundational experiences with translation might lead to surprising professional pathways by which graduates give back to the field.

Moderator: Fion Tse

Panelists: Annie Janusch, Thomas Mira y Lopez, Mayada Ibrahim

This panel will trace the connections between translation, testimony, and political performance. We understand political performances both as artistic works that act out political issues and as active practices of presenting a claim for justice to an audience. How can the original works be adjusted, given specific details from the community and the local audience, without diluting their calls for justice? Gloria will analyze her translation of women’s testimonies from Quechua to Spanish, while Isabelle will spotlight the political potential of the Spanish socialist play Mineros by Carmen Conde and María Cegarra. Lynette will discuss her translation decisions to highlight the author’s political critique in the allegorical story “La reunión de ayer” by Adela Zamudio, and Heather will explore a range of translation decisions in the spirit of “Give and Take” while co-translating the memoir of Dominican political resistance Vivas en su jardín by Dedé Mirabal. Focusing on translations using Spanish, English, and Quechua, the panel will be held in English with some Spanish.

Moderator: Isabelle Rogers

Panelists: Gloria Macedo-Janto, Lynette Yetter, Heather Hennes

Can we think of translations not as separate trees planted at a distance from the original, but as shoots of the same rhizome, each a new part of the same organism, shaped by its own environment and moment, but connected below the surface to everything that came before? Retranslation thus ceases to be an individual practice and becomes a family of responses to the richness of accumulated versions and the exchanges that produced them. We draw on members of that family—uncanny relationships with past translators, restorative retranslation practices, anthologizing, translation back into the source language, and considerations of audience—to suggest that retranslation is not a process of “give and take,” but a collaborative process of “give and give” across literary generations.

Moderator: Anna Zielinska-Elliott

Panelists: J. Keith Vincent, William Waters, Alejandro López, Dina Famin

When David Bellos suddenly left us in October, his absence was hard to fathom. He was a central figure in the world of translation: the founder of Princeton’s Program in Translation and Intercultural Communication, and his ceaselessly curious, inventive, and influential body of work encompassed translation, biography, history and theory. This panel brings together friends and colleagues of Bellos to probe the dimensions of his legacy: Karen Emmerich, now director of the Princeton PTIC, Chris Clarke, an expert on Oulipo and member of Outranspo, Shelley Frisch, who attended many of Bellos’s wonderful Princeton Translation Lunches, Cecilia Ramsey, who was working with Bellos on his latest project, and Esther Allen, who often draws on Bellos’ work in her essays on translation.

Moderator: Esther Allen

Panelists: Cecilia Ramsey, Shelley Frisch, Chris Clarke, Karen Emmerich, Liesl Yamaguchi

To work in translation is always to work in relation—to a writer, a style, a language, a place. But how about the ways translators work in relation to one another? This panel brings together translators who work in different languages and are at different moments in their careers to explore the relationships that sustain literary translation. What are the modes of collaboration and mentorship that enrich our work, and what does true reciprocity in those relationships look like? What key moments of mentorship (formal or informal, given or received) have shaped us as translators? What collaborations and communities have held, challenged, or inspired us? What do we value in these relationships, and what can we do to better sustain one another within this ecosystem?

Moderator: Chloe Martinez

Panelists: Kareem James Abu-Zeid, Nancy Naomi Carlson, Archana Madhavan, Daniel Kraft

SEEKING PARTICIPANTS

Autofiction, a genre first defined in the late twentieth century, is often understood as a hybrid practice that erases the boundaries between lived experiences and literary inventions. Shaped by the author’s subjectivity, memory, trauma, and relationship to time and place, autofiction raises a set of challenges for translators: what happens when the narrator’s and author’s voices merge into one? How do translators navigate intimacy, distance, and responsibility when translating a voice that is both personal testimony and fictional narrative? Translators from Russian, Norwegian, and Spanish come together to discuss translating autofiction, collaboration between translators and authors, and the ethics of literary intrusion.

Moderator: Daria Shchukina

Panelists:Andrea Avey, Mauricio Ruiz, Antoinette Rose Goodrich

Contact: Daria Shchukina, dariaschukin@gmail.com

Wordplay in Chinese differs dramatically from wordplay in English and even includes forms of wordplay, such as tonal homophony and character-based puns playing off visual similarities, that many students of the language insist are impossible to translate into English, a claim that has inspired the translators on this panel to take up the challenge and prove them wrong. In addition to clarifying the differences between Chinese and English wordplay, this panel will share useful strategies for negotiating the inevitably challenging and exhilarating give-and-take of rendering Chinese wordplay into English.

Moderator: Steve Bradbury

Panelists: Chenxin Jiang, Allie Haiyin Xiang, Tony Hao

This panel includes several leading translators of graphic novels as well as the editor of New York Review Comics, which will allow our conversation to be a broad “give and take” about matters concerning the current state of the practice as well as the publication of literary comics in translation in North America. The conversation will be followed by a Q&A.

Moderator: Geoffrey Brock

Panelists: Edward Gauvin, Janet Hong, Jamie Richards, Lucas Adams

This panel will focus on translating poetry by contemporary poets from the global Palestinian diaspora, with a particular focus on Honduran author Rolando Kattan. Panelists will discuss the challenge of translating poets who are doubly marginalized, originating in a land that is widely denied political recognition and living with this identity in other countries and writing in other languages. How can we learn and grow as translators while navigating this complex cultural identity? What are the ethical ramifications of translating poets from zones of war, conflict, and dispossession? We hope that this panel will be of interest not only to translators who work with Palestinian poetry, but also to those who work with poets from other marginalized and diasporic backgrounds.

Moderator: Michelle Gil-Montero

Panelists: Kareem James Abu-Zeid, Kate Hedeen, Víctor Rodríguez Núñez, Rolando Kattan

This panel brings together translators and writers working across Taiwanese, Hong Kong, and other Sinophone literary spheres to explore our experiences carrying sinophone texts into English. We will question how Taiwan has brought us all together, how Taiwanese publishing, cultural institutions, workshops, collaboration, grants, and prizes shape which works become visible internationally, and how we represent Taiwan on the global stage without flattening its complexity.

Moderator: Kevin Wang

Panelists: Jennifer Feeley, Gigi Leung, Lin King, Lya Shaffer

This panel focuses on orality as a source of challenges and possibilities. Working in contexts as diverse as Kazakhstan, India, Bolivia, and Russia, the panelists will share their experiences translating literary texts that have their origins in oral traditions, or that engage with orality in innovative ways. We will discuss how the presence of orality in a literary text can complicate notions of authorship, audience, and context. We will offer strategies for rendering the “give and take” of oral literature — i.e. its experiential and relational aspects — into text. We will also consider the entextualization of oral tradition as part of broader processes of colonial extraction and ideological indoctrination, and examine our own role as translators in its perpetuation and resistance.

Moderator: Naomi Caffee

Panelists: Jenny Bhatt, Shelley Fairweather-Vega, Shaina Brassard, Sibelan Forrester

SEEKING PARTICIPANTS

This panel will address issues relating to translation of archaic texts. In the context of this panel, the word “archaic” may refer to the language, the writing style, the content, or any other aspect of the text that is out of line with contemporary writing. The panelists will examine the challenges of reciprocity when translating these texts: To what degree does the translator maintain the style and sentence structure of the original text, and to what degree do they edit the style to facilitate comprehension by contemporary readers? How should a translator translate archaic vocabulary? How many explanatory footnotes should a translator include? How should a translator address content that may be offensive to modern sensibilities?

Moderator: Michael Rulon

Panelists: Sebastian Weinkum, Peyton Bullock

Contact: Michael Rulon, Michael.Rulon@nau.edu

We tend to conceive of literary translation as a force for good, but historically, it has often served cultural imperialism: providing a means to restrict language and uphold national frameworks. In an age of new nationalism and persecution of marginalized voices, what can we do to push back? How might genre and style reach beyond national literary traditions? How do multilingual practices resist and reveal the monolinguistic ordering of the nation-state paradigm? How do queer and diasporic writers think past the borders of national communities? What can we learn from past/present censorship of literature and its translation? How can our contributions as translators, critics, editors, publicists, scholars, and writers provide tangible reminders of the diversity within our shared humanity?

Moderator: Jon Cho-Polizzi

Panelists: Bonnie Chau, Elete Nelson-Fearon, Elizabeth Sun

Times, tastes, and taboos have changed since Arthur Waley made it a point of principle never to visit the “Orient” whose reputation he had, by introducing so many of its classics to English, such a hand in shaping. African American writer Albert Murray liked to read his students a Hemingway passage describing a Havana park, then ask if they had seen the palm trees never once mentioned. But every word we choose as translators is also the tip of an iceberg—what lies beneath, buoyant yet fathomless, a compound of context, etymology, genre, histories communal and personal, cultures of source and reception. How, then, are our linguistic endeavors informed by firsthand experience of places where that language lives?

Moderator: Edward Gauvin

Panelists: Mercedes Gilliom, Elete Nelson-Fearon, Chenxin Jiang, Larissa Kyzer

Literary texts embed historical memory. Translation retrieves or rewrites historical memory to either reflect and validate it, refract it by filtering through the bias of the translator’s memory; or diffract it by resisting it. Bauer will draw from his translation of Molina’s I Won’t See You Die, a novel about the power of memory, the ravages of time and the obstinacy of love. Ordukhanyan will draw from her translations of Pachyan to explore how disfigured Russian in contemporary Armenian literature relate to collective and individualized historical memory. Baer will draw from the biography of B. G. Guerney, a Russian émigré translator into English, to argue that memory is inseparable from Guerney’s diasporic self-fashioning.

Moderator: Aron Aji

Panelists: Curtis Bauer, Margarit Ordikhanyan, Brian Baer

Translation at its best is an act of collaboration: with co-translators, authors, previous translations, the books that influence our authors, and ultimately our readers. In addition to addressing the traditional notions of collaboration in the translation field we will explore the importance of relationships with publishers, agents, university presses, funders, professional organizations, literary magazines, and others. How can translators, working from the universe of the text outward, engage in more productive partnerships with the translation ecosystem? The panelists will give examples of how collaboration has played a role in their work and their thinking about the art of translation and its role in the literary marketplace.

Moderator: Elizabeth Lowe

Panelists: Gabi Page-Fort, Larissa Kyzer, Mario Pereira, D.P. Snyder

Book reviews play a vital role in bringing attention to literature in translation. Translators are especially well positioned to review translations with rigor, cultural insight, and linguistic expertise. Reviewing is also a form of professional and intellectual exchange: it sharpens critical skills, deepens engagement with the work of others, and creates space for conversation about the art and craft of translation. The panelists will reflect on that give and take, sharing their experiences as reviewers, what this task asks of them and what it gives in return, and will offer practical advice for translators who are interested in getting started, thus encouraging our colleagues to see reviewing translated literature as a meaningful way of giving back to the larger translation community.

Moderator: D. P. Snyder

Panelists: Ilze Duarte, George Henson, Stiliana Milkova, Emma Murray

Co-translation is often described as a practical arrangement, but it is also a creative and intellectual partnership. In keeping with the ALTA49 theme of “Give and Take,” this panel brings together translators who work in pairs across institutions, countries, historical periods, and time zones to discuss how collaborative practice reshapes the act of reading, writing, and revising. It also brings together translators working in a range of languages: Croatian, Italian, Ottoman Turkish, (Soviet-era) Russian, (Argentine) Spanish, Ukrainian, and Yiddish. Panelists will reflect on the pleasures and challenges of sharing the workload, listening to each other, negotiation, disagreement, trust, as well as the tools and methods that make collaboration (in the same room or at a distance) possible.

Moderator: Sasha Senderovich

Panelists: Burcu Karahan, Harriet Murav, Russell Scott Valentino, Will Morningstar

How is one’s writing impacted by the texts that one translates? And, conversely, how does a writing practice influence translation? Panelists will consider the technical aspects of the bidirectional influence of their respective practices, the way that their style, diction, and voice as writers and translators are informed by their work, as well as the social ramifications on their positionality, identity, and politics. The ultimate goal: to articulate and amplify the aspects of these parallel pursuits that make us more creative and engaged as both writers and translators.

Moderator: Julia Conrad

Panelists: Lizzie Buehler, Bela Shayevich, Jan Steyn

Many books exist that would not without interaction between languages. In such cases, translation cannot be considered “derivative” work; it is embedded in the very process of creation. Writing outside the mother tongue (exophony), self-translation, and linguistic hybrids, for example, are writerly practices which draw on multiple languages while never inhabiting fully just one. Michael Emmerich speaks of the translator as a ghostly figure who haunts, and is haunted by, at least two languages and cultures. Michael Cronin envisions the translator as a wanderer in constant movement. Our panelists will consider cases of writing that originate in this ghostly, in-between, and mobile space and will describe how such texts might move beyond outmoded perspectives on translation.

Moderator: Jim Hicks

Panelists: Anna Botta, Stiliana Milkova, Brian Baer

Children’s literature is where words and pictures, readers and listeners, the grown-up world and the child world meet. How can that meeting place be made more fun and welcoming? We’ll hear from an established translator on the musical chairs of the Korean and English picture book markets and the many costumes that must be worn to get books on shelves. An emerging translator will talk about using multimedia to dodge gatekeepers and the hide-and-seek of translating a pioneering-yet-blacklisted Korean writer. And a picture book artist will present on building a diasporic jungle gym of a book that turns language barriers into an obstacle course to be enjoyed.

Moderator: Sora Kim-Russell

Panelists: Aerin Park, G.S. Hand, Leslie Pyo

Zines (short for magazines) can take many of forms, but they are typically non-commercial, produced by hand, and circulated outside the channels of “official” publication. Whether you’ve made dozens of zines or never heard of them, you’re welcome to join our workshop. We’ll be sharing some examples of translated zines and providing simple strategies to make your own. Plus, we’ll take time to write and collage pages that we’ll scan, compile, and mail back out to participants as a collective zine after the workshop. Some questions guiding our time together will be: How did translation find its way into your life? What are some things you have found in and through translation? What have you not yet found but hope to find? How do we think about access and publishing practice in translation?

Leader: Ryan Greene

You’ve turned in the translation, now what? How do you reach your readers? Reaching your readers is an opportunity to educate on how translation is a deeply human act and define yourself as an artist of your work, both of which have become increasingly important in the age of AI. In this workshop you will begin to draft your own promotion plan from your position as a translator which you can then use to complement and even boost the promotion work of your press. We will workshop diverse strategies that are free and accessible for translators both on and offline. Please come prepared with one forthcoming or potential/dream project in mind that you will work with during our workshop.

Leader: Michelle Mirabella

Join the Transletting collective in looking at how one text can spawn many translations and how creative translation can open up new ways of looking at literary translation. With one text as the centerpiece, participants will first tackle the text using the creative translation approach of their preference, such as collage work, homophonic translation, or erasure. Afterwards, the literary translation of the text will be revealed, with participants comparing their creative translations and observing what was focused on in the differences in translation. Here, participants will be able to see what is gained with writers exchanging differing translations of the same text, as well as what can we learn about the text through how others experience it regardless of the original language.

Leaders: Samuel Haecker, Daniela Ordonez Delgado

What can we learn when we give ourselves over to heightened moments of difficulty and how can we take up moments of complexity to transform the translation? This workshop aims to address those phrases, puns, idioms, etc. that make a work seem “untranslatable.” By inviting attendees to bring a short passage (think a sentence or a line) that they find particularly resistant to translation, we’ll create a shared space to navigate complex, multilingual texts, and think through a list of approaches to use in the future. Participants are invited to bring a short, “impossible” passage for collective ideation. You’d also be welcome to bring a dozen or so printed copies for distribution during the workshop.

Leaders: Elanor Spring, Adam Ray Wagner

Drama translators must craft lines that work well when spoken by actors. This give-and-take means theatre translators make many revisions during the rehearsal process to ensure a script’s text and subtext emerge clearly in performance. In this interactive workshop, participants will read scenes from each other’s play translations and discuss how diction, rhythm, and sound can help actors make lines of dialogue land. Bring a dozen copies of your translation (from any language into English, maximum two pages) and a willingness to “play” with lines. How does the collective approach inherent in theatre translation lead to the best possible version of a text? Learn about the Theatre in Translation Network and meet others working to promote drama in translation.

Leaders: Neil Blackadder, H. J. Gardner

Languages do not always enter translation equally. Some voices circulate with institutional visibility while others remain marginalized or historically suppressed. How do queer translation practices shift when languages exist within unequal relationships? How do we as a community create sustainable ecosystems for queer voices, including minor and minority languages, and subvert, overthrow, and transform conventional linguistic standards through playfulness and care? What ethical questions do translators ask when shaping unexpectedness and breaking underrepresentation? From selected authors and texts, we’ll explore and share what it means to build a community grounded in reciprocity, experimentation, and resistance. Participants can bring short texts to work on during the workshop.

Leaders: paparouna, Jenna Tang

A translator’s note is a distinct creative practice, a space where the translator’s voice, process and considerations become explicitly visible. Here, we are involved in an ultimate act of giving – but what do we want our readers to take from our notes? This session will focus on both the craft of the translator’s note and its practical realities. What should a translator’s note include, and can it become a creative work in its own right? How do readers respond it, and do we have complete freedom when writing it? Is it an appendix, a stand-alone piece, or even a genre of its own? We will explore these questions through a variety of examples and exercises, and the participants are encouraged to bring memorable translator’s notes into the discussion, whether written by themselves or others.

Leaders: Kotryna Garanasvili

This interactive workshop will explore idiomatic expressions, set phrases, and metaphors involving animals of all sizes and phylum. We will also examine how references to animals may carry innuendos and hidden meanings. The elephant in the room is that meanings and symbolism change depending on language or cultural context, and the workshop will include examples from both poetry and fiction. How would you translate “ஓசை பெற்று உயர் பாற்கடல் உற்று. ஒரு பூசை முற்றவும் நக்குபு புக்கென,” “Como el burro que tocó la flauta,””Bey u beel weeche,” ‘”猿も木から落ちる,”or “Ich glaube, mein Schwein pfeift” into English? Finally, we’ll look briefly at translation theory via Peter Newmark’s “The Translation of Metaphor” (because, after all, “animal metaphors or metonyms […] are not intertranslatable”). Participants may send an example of an “animal quandary” or an example from their own work to AlasVerdesTranslationNW@gmail.com. 

Leaders: Allison deFreese, Prabu Muruganantham

Translators connect languages, cultures, and social systems. They are powerful, but often navigate tricky waters, even self-censoring on multiple fronts, due to cultural taboos, political or ideological conflicts, original author protection, respect for target audience sensibilities, or expectations of editors and publishers, etc. This workshop, focused on translation and self-censorship, will create a forum for stories, reflections, and challenges that translators meet in their praxis and publishing experiences. It aims to amplify translators’ voices, build solidarity, and construct healthy professional guidelines. Workshop leaders will provide cases for discussion, and participants can contribute translation experiences of self-censorship, read from relevant works, and share research.

Leaders: Yuemin He, Marella Feltrin-Morris

We will study examples of tricky situations where the translator faces the choice between foreignization and domestication and must argue which choice is better. Giving in to the source text may lead to foreignization; taking the source text out of its original context may lead to domestication. This is an issue for the translation process, but also for the translator’s interaction with first readers—potentially, author, editor, publishers, also possibly other translators in a collective context. We may engage in a give-and-take with these first readers on this very issue. What reciprocity can we expect in such negotiations? When are we giving and when are we taking? Seeking participants from all languages and genres. Please send pertinent examples to armine@illinois.edu for discussion.

Leaders: Armine Kotin Mortimer, David M. Smith

Translation is built around community, and community is built around translation. This is one of the foundational principles of Translation Station, a series of biweekly gatherings for translators in New York City—ongoing since September 2025. Co-organizers Mary Noorlander and Ale Quintana Arocho came up with the idea for Translation Station out of a need to carve out space for translators and learners of languages alike to meet each other, work together, and engage in creative exercises. In this workshop, participants will learn about sustaining communities in/through translation, and they will partake in a game of “telephone translation” from a poem in English. They will produce an iterative “give and take” of their translations & practice exchanging languages, experiences, and care.

Leaders: Alejandra Quintana Arocho, Mary Noorlander

In the Introduction to The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Activism, co-editors Rebecca Ruth Gould and Kayvan Tahmasebian identify four paradigms of the translator-activist: the witness-bearer, the voice-giver, the vernacular mediator, and the revolutionary. More broadly, every translator may be regarded as an activist, to the extent that every translator acts as a cultural agent even when not explicitly espousing an activist cause. This workshop invites concrete examples of activism in translation, including issues of ethics, politics, sustainability, the rendering of silenced voices and languages of lesser diffusion, etc. It also support translators in identifying paths toward advocacy and ways their translations can be catalysts for social justice and social engagement.

Leaders: Marella Feltrin-Morris, Allison deFreese