Translating the Weird and Wildly Inappropriate—And What Does That Even Mean?, Part 1

Translation can be weird work: when we bring another culture into English, we’re often faced with the question of whether to mitigate or amplify weirdness for the comfort of our readers. Similarly, we confront texts containing elements we might consider inappropriate, from homophobic characters to racist slurs.

But who are we trying to make comfortable or uncomfortable in translation? And how far should translators go in the pursuit of weirdness, be it structural, literary, or cultural? We’ll talk about why unfamiliarity is part of the boundary-navigating (and -pushing) work that translators do, as well as how the literary translation market fetishizes, yet also rejects, weirdness. Format: Organizers and participants will bring an excerpt of the weirdest or most inappropriate translation they have done, and share strategies they employed to navigate that strangeness.

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Organizers

May Huang is a writer and translator from Hong Kong and Taiwan. Her work has appeared in Circumference, Electric Literature, Words Without Borders, World Literature Today, and elsewhere. She graduated from the University of Chicago with honors in English and Comparative Literature in 2019. Natascha Bruce translates from Chinese. Her work includes Lonely Face by Yeng Pway Ngon, Lake Like a Mirror by Ho Sok Fong, and (in progress) Owlish by Dorothy Tse, for which she was awarded a 2021 PEN/Heim Grant. Jenna Tang is a Taiwanese literary translator based in New York. She translates from Mandarin Chinese and Spanish. Her translations are published in Restless Books’ anthology And We Came Outside and Saw the Stars Again, Latin American Literature Today, and elsewhere. She is one of the selected translators for the 2021 ALTA Emerging Translator Mentorship Program with a focus on Taiwanese prose.

Participants

Jack Hargreaves is a translator from East Yorkshire. His work has appeared in Words Without Borders, LitHub, Asymptote, adda and LARB China Channel. Recent translations include, with Yan Yan, Li Juan’s Winter Pasture and Chai Jing’s Seeing, Shen Dacheng’s Novelist in the Attic, A History of Chinese Philosophical Thought, and Buddhism and Buddhology. Paige Aniyah Morris hails from Jersey City, NJ. She holds BAs in Ethnic Studies and Literary Arts from Brown University and an MFA in Creative Writing from Rutgers University-Newark. The recipient of awards from ALTA and the Fulbright Program, her writing and translations have appeared in The Georgia Review, The Rumpus, and more. Anne Henochowicz works at the intersection of literature and human rights. She has translated poetry by Meng Lang, Yu Xiuhua, and Yu Xinqiao, and essays by Tang Danhong and Li Jingrui, appearing in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Cha, and Mānoa. She is the Translations Coordinator at China Digital Times. Priscilla Hunter, PhD, Emerita Professor of Spanish at Southern Oregon University, translates Latin American literature. Her publications include poems, translations, reviews, and essays (literary, film, and translation criticism). Argentine writer Enrique Luis Revol’s novel Abrupt Mutations (Sudamericana 1971; Dalkey 2018) is her first book-length publication. Mairead Harris translates fiction and prose from Spanish and Chinese into English, focusing on authors who write from the United States. She is Associate Director of the Middlebury Chinese School; she does professional development for language teachers and curriculum design for language programs through her consulting business Language Wise. Brianna Salinas is a lifelong student of language and literature. Having recently completed an MA in Hispanic Literary Studies, she is currently helping NOTIS (the Northwest Translators and Interpreters Society) with communications and marketing, considering a PhD program, and translating the poetry of Argentina’s Alfonsina Storni and the sardonic prose of Spain’s Rosario Villajos.