Softening the Blow: Translating Racialized Language

How do we translate racial dynamics and racialized language without imposing US frameworks that aren’t universal? How do we translate terms that have been borrowed from English and have taken on slippery connotations in their new contexts? How do we translate texts that participate in racism? How do we navigate moments of othering in the source text? Examples of terms to be discussed include “oriental,” “blackface,” and “black.”

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Moderator

Bruna Dantas Lobato is a Brazilian writer and translator based in St. Louis. Her work has appeared in A Public Space, BOMB, The Kenyon Review, Harvard Review, and elsewhere. Her translation of Caio Fernando Abreu’s Moldy Strawberries received a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant and is forthcoming from Archipelago Books.

Presenters

Mariam Rahmani’s current projects include a novel-in-progress and, with the support a PEN/Heim translation grant, a translation of Mahsa Mohebali’s award-winning Don’t Worry from Farsi into English, forthcoming with Feminist Press. She is a candidate for the PhD in Comparative Literature at UCLA, writing a dissertation on translating the queer, and an MFA student in Fiction at Columbia. Jennifer Shyue is a translator of Cuban and Asian-Peruvian writers. She has an MFA in Literary Translation from the University of Iowa and received a Fulbright grant to Peru in 2019. Her translations appear in The Offing, The Margins, Words Without Borders, and other outlets. Find her at shyue.co. Layla Benitez-James is based in Alicante, Spain. Her work has appeared in EuropeNow Journal, The London Magazine, The Acentos Review, Waxwing, Revista Kokoro, and Asymptote. Her first chapbook, God Suspected My Heart Was a Geode But He Had to Make Sure was selected by Major Jackson for the 2017 Toi Derricotte & Cornelius Eady Chapbook Prize.