A Smaller World: How International Connections Transform Translators’ Careers, Part 2

Some of the opportunities we’ll discuss include: US-based translators working with publishers in other Anglophone or non-Anglophone countries, US-based translation programs bringing in international input, and publishers outside the US looking to expand their US footprint and vice versa, among many others. The roundtable especially welcomes emerging translators looking to make use of opportunities to engage and build community internationally. Format: We’ll start with a wide-ranging discussion of new ways translators are engaging internationally. Next, each participant will discuss an organization outside the US with which they have collaborated, hope to collaborate, or believe ALTA should work with.

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Organizers

Chenxin Jiang translates from Italian, Chinese, and German. Her recent translation Tears of Salt: A Doctor’s Story, by Pietro Bartolo and Lidia Tilotta, was shortlisted for the 2019 Italian Prose in Translation award. She serves on the Board of ALTA. Aviya Kushner is the author of The Grammar of God and Wolf Lamb Bomb. The Forward’s language columnist, she translates Hebrew poetry and is on the Board of ALTA. Amaia Gabantxo is a writer, singer, and translator specializing in Basque literature. She is a 2020-21 CLEAR Marine Lab Artist in Residence at St. John’s Memorial University and was a judge for the 2020 National Translation Award in Prose. A lecturer at the Art Institute of Chicago and an ART OMI resident, she released her album Kantuz: 1931 last year.

Participants

Mia Spangenberg translates from Finnish and German into English. Her work has been published in the UK and Finland and appeared in journals like Asymptote and Lithub. She is also a regular contributor to the WorldKidLit blog that champions children’s literature from around the world. Armine Kotin Mortimer, PhD, holder of an NEA Fellowship and the French Palmes académiques, has published translations of four books, most recently Angot’s An Impossible Love from Archipelago, as well as 128,000 words by and about Julia Kristeva. Excerpts from 18 other literary translations have appeared in literary magazines. Allison M. Charette translates mostly fiction by Malagasy authors Naivo, Johary Ravaloson, Michèle Rakotoson, and others. She founded ELTNA.org, a networking and support group for early-career translators. Allison is a working parent with two small children and would be happy to commiserate with you. Linda Gaus holds a PhD in German Literature and has more than twenty years of translation experience; she is trying to make literary translation her “retirement plan,” since she can’t ever imagine retiring! Ho Zhi Hui is a Singaporean translator, writer, and teacher. In 2021, she completed her MA in Translation & Interpretation at Nanyang Technological University and is currently working on a short-story collection by Singaporean writer Yuan Fei, entitled Neighbour’s Luck. She is particularly interested in how translation and language serve as vectors of power, especially in multilingual nations. Laura Venita Green is an MFA candidate and undergraduate teaching fellow at Columbia University. Her fiction has appeared in Fatal Flaw, her translation in World Literature Today, and her fiction in Italian translation is forthcoming in Spazinclusi. Matthew Spencer lives and writes in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States of America. His translation of Anecdotes by Heinrich von Kleist will be available through Sublunary Editions in October 2021. As an emerging German to English literary translator, Ruth Krawczyk has published one novel and one short story. Her background is in commercial translation, but now with partial retirement she is turning to her true love of literary translation. A graduate of KSU’s MA translation program, she is now based in Southern Arizona. After a decades long career in law, Linda Worrell is venturing into the world of translation. So, very much an emerging translator. In 2019, Worrell attended the introductory translation workshop at Bread Loaf and the Italian workshop at the British Centre for Literary Translation. Worrell lives in New York and in England and, before the pandemic, spent several months of the year in Italy. Wioletta Polanski is a higher education professional and a published translator of Polish and English. She holds two MA degrees in Translation Studies and in Art & Design/Humanities Computing, both from the University of Alberta. Her research interest encompasses the life and work of Magdalena Samozwaniec, the Kossak Family phenomenon, Holocaust memory, and popular women’s literature. Don Henderson, born in Frankfurt am Main, is an emerging literary translator based in the Washington, D.C. area. He graduated from Indiana University with a Masters in German Literature and is passionate about contemporary German writing.