We had spent a year planning the programme and we couldn’t wait to get started. The ‘Symphony of Island and Literature’ translation workshop had been scheduled for November, the typhoon season would be over by then. After all, Taiwan hadn’t had a typhoon in November for 58 years. The workshop programme would take us to Taiwan’s old historic capital Tainan and to some of the indigenous villages in the mountains on the east coast. We would be working with 20 Chinese-English literary translators, translating the works of contemporary writers in Taiwan.
I had quite some time to wait when I arrived at the airport for my long journey to Taiwan. If you know me, you’ll know that I’m early for everything. I grabbed a coffee and a second breakfast and started to jot down some notes, as I knew I wanted to write a piece about my trip and my ongoing work with the National Museum of Taiwan Literature (NMTL). I had first come across the museum and their work when I met Chen Pin-Chuan in 2020. He was the Director of the Cultural Division of the Taipei Representative Office in the UK at the time. Believe me, when I met him in his rather formal role as a diplomat, I wasn’t expecting to be having breakfast with him many years later in Taiwan – him insisting I try a bowl of thousand-year-old egg congee! Pin-Chuan initially came to visit us in Norwich as he wanted to find a way to introduce more Taiwanese works to the UK, with the aim of creating a wider awareness and understanding of Taiwan and Taiwanese arts. This visit marked the inception of an exciting partnership with the NMTL that has included three years of Literature from Taiwan translation workshops at the BCLT Summer School – translating the works of the formidable Taiwanese writers Chi Ta-Wei, Kan Yao-Ming and Chuan-Fen Chang. These sessions were followed by a more advanced translation workshop in 2024, residencies at the National Centre for Writing (NCW) and a series of Taiwanese chapbooks published by Strangers Press. We felt that the next logical step in the programme would be to start running workshops in Taiwan and so here we are.
We received 100 applications from translators to attend the first workshop in Taiwan. I was excited to meet our chosen participants and get to know more about them. Having read their applications, I knew their backgrounds and experiences were incredibly varied and I was intrigued to see how their lives might impact their work and their approach to translating the literature. Why Taiwan? Why Taiwanese literature? Let me introduce you to two of our translators – Zofia Mądry has no family connection to Taiwan and currently lives in Krakow, Poland. She translates from Chinese into Polish and started translating literature during the 2nd year of a BA in Chinese Studies. Zofia told me she is ‘fascinated by Taiwanese society and its collective and personal experiences, which it gives voice to in its literature. The Taiwanese literary works combine diverse influences and capture unique historical and contemporary circumstances, creating a distinctive rhetoric that poses an intriguing challenge for the translator.’ Jennifer C. Lee is a translator from Wales, UK and had taken a Chinese language class on Taiwanese Short Stories during her year abroad in Taipei and really enjoyed the pieces that she read on the course. A year later she had started reading more Taiwanese literature and took a class on reading in translation, and from there she decided to pursue an MA in Literary Translation at BCLT. I already knew Jennifer from her time at BCLT, in fact she was also my intern for a few months, working on the BCLT Summer School. When I asked her about why she has chosen to translate literature from Taiwan in particular she said, ‘Taiwanese literature is really interesting from a queer and diverse perspective. The country’s difficult colonial history has resulted in a multifaceted cultural landscape and, generally speaking, I think that multiplicity and diversity make for some of the most interesting literature.’ Does a Welsh translator of Taiwanese literature bring a different texture to a text in comparison to a Polish one? How about if a translator has spent time living in the country but another has only ever read about it?
I joined the BCLT in 2016 and I’m lucky enough to meet hundreds of translators every year. I am still fascinated by why people choose to translate literature. What are their journeys to translation like? Were there sliding doors moments in their lives that led them to translating or lured them to a particular region’s literature?
Having spent over 5 years working with colleagues in Taiwan, it was such an honour to finally be in the country getting to know where all this exciting literature was coming from. The plan was to spend 3 days at the museum, translating an extract of 新寶島 (The Formosa Exchange) by Taiwanese author Huang Chong-kai. It is a work of magical realism exploring what happens when the citizens of Taiwan wake up to find they have all switched places with the citizens of Cuba. Our workshop leader would be Jeremy Tiang – a Singaporean translator based in New York who has translated over thirty books from Chinese, including novels by the Taiwanese writers Lo Yi-Chin, Ping Lu and Su Wei-Chen. We first worked with Jeremy back in 2019, when he took part in the Training the Trainer workshop strand at the BCLT Summer School, supported by the National Arts Council of Singapore. Jeremy has been a driving force throughout BCLT’s work with Taiwan and his guidance has inspired countless emerging translators. Anthony Bird from the independent publisher Honford Star was also part of the workshop (and will be publishing Jeremy’s translation of The Formosa Exchange in Autumn 2026).
After our time in Tainan, we were going to travel to Taitung on the east coast and spend the next 3 days translating indigenous authors and visiting their villages, learning about indigenous stories, languages, culture and the different tribes. However, the weather had other plans. Forecasters and the Taiwan government advice websites were warning us of a massive typhoon and it looked like it was going to hit us directly. The NMTL team had to start preparations for a ‘typhoon holiday’. I mean I wouldn’t class sheltering from a potentially life-threatening typhoon a ‘holiday’ but everyone seemed pretty relaxed about it all, so I just went with the flow. Whilst awaiting said typhoon we experienced an earthquake. This was my first earthquake and it was rather unexpected. I didn’t know at this point that Taiwan has earthquakes almost every day, although you don’t feel most of them. The floor moved, the light fixtures swayed, but all was well. I was told that I was extremely lucky, as I would get to have the full Taiwanese experience whilst on my 10-day adventure (again I wouldn’t perhaps use the word ‘lucky’, but I appreciated the upbeat nature of my hosts).
Unfortunately, the next evening we were told that the local government had indeed announced a typhoon holiday and all trains to Taitung were cancelled and all public buildings had to close for a day whilst the typhoon passed. As we sheltered in our accommodation, we went online for a day and thankfully still got to meet the authors, including Sakinu Ahronglong, an Indigenous Paiwan writer, born in the Lalauran community of Taimali. Through simple yet powerful prose, Sakinu records memories of tribal life, ecological knowledge, and the Indigenous philosophy of harmony with nature. We also met Badai, a Puyuma writer from the Damalagaw (Tabalugaw) community in Taian Village. His works take Puyuma communities as their narrative core, reconstructing historical memory and cultural values.
As the translators couldn’t physically travel to Taitung, we went on an additional trip to the National Museum of Taiwan History. We learnt about the complex history of the island, including the Dutch, Qing Dynasty and Japanese periods of rule. We learnt about language politics in Taiwan – including Mandarin’s historical dominance and the past suppression of many local languages, and how generations of indigenous people throughout history have been forcibly moved and divided. Officially recognised languages in Taiwan include Mandarin Chinese, Taiwanese Hokkein, Hakka and Matsu dialect, but there are many other languages spoken. This relatively short visit to the museum helped me to understand just how complicated the story of Taiwan and its people really is. It’s not a large island – only 245 miles long and 90 miles wide, similar in size to Switzerland or the Netherlands. 70% of the land is covered in mountains. With a population of 23.5 million people, it is one of the most densely populated countries in the world. I now knew more about the history of the island, the culture and the amazing food (beef noodle soup is my favourite), and I continued to learn more about the translators that were so passionate about translating Taiwan’s literature.
Shengchi Hsu was born and raised in Taiwan. He spent a few years in Manchester in the UK doing a PhD in Literary Translation but had to return to Taiwan to care for his aging parents. He came to literary translation because he wanted to use literature as a vehicle to tell his friends and students in the UK more about Taiwan. Having now spent time on the island I can see why Shengchi would want to play an active role in making it possible for the English-speaking world to read more stories from his home country, a country that is perhaps misunderstood and quite often misrepresented.
Another participant, who would like to remain anonymous, is from the US and currently lives in Taipei with her Taiwanese partner. Her mother is from Hong Kong and her father is American and studied in Taiwan in the 1970s. She had been dreaming of translating literature for about a decade and finally felt her reading ability was good enough to try. When I asked her about her journey to translating Taiwanese literature she said, ‘I was inspired by reading Taiwanese feminist authors and queer authors, who I feel are writing about universal questions but also experimenting with language and writing about social settings that are particular to the Taiwanese context—a unique cultural-historical formation which has multiple contradictory influences from democratic and social justice politics, Confucianism, China, Japan, indigenous cultures, and many other sources.’ Taiwan seems to be one of those places that lives long in the memory, so perhaps her father’s memories led her there?
brenda Lin was born in the US, but her family moved back to Taiwan when she was four. Although her entire extended family had immigrated to the US, her father never felt like he belonged there. I asked brenda why she started to translate literature from Taiwan and she said, ‘In retrospect, I think I started translating Taiwanese literature as a part of my homecoming journey. I needed to relearn so many things about Taiwan – language, culture, geography, smells, and tastes – and translation was my way in.’ Translation as a homecoming.
Another anonymous participant who is from the UK, married a man from Taiwan, had children and settled in the country. She now lives in rural Taiwan in a small village. She started translating literature in 2012 and is compelled to translate Taiwanese literature specifically because she has lived in the country for 10 years, has family in Taiwan, and feels able to tell (and is interested in telling) ‘Taiwan’s story’. This is a theme repeated throughout many of my conversations with the translators – they need to tell Taiwan’s story and let the world know how much breadth there is within its tales.
Each of these translators began the practice of literary translation with a different story. They all have varying life experiences that made them want to translate literature from Taiwan. Some of the translators came with no connections to Taiwan but had fallen in love with the literature and culture and wanted to make it accessible to their friends. Some had been born in other parts of the world but had parents that were Taiwanese and they wanted to understand more about their heritage. Some were on a voyage home and literature allowed them to reconnect with a part of themselves. This ongoing programme of work is building a community of translators that may have different journeys but are all united by their commitment to the language and the literature. In getting to know each of them and hearing their personal stories, I am fascinated by how their unique lives effect their translation work and their motivation to keep going as translators.
I didn’t particularly want to write a piece about AI and literary translation, however in writing about the stories of those translating Taiwanese literature today, I can’t help but see how much would be lost if a machine was used for the job. When these 20 workshop translators have their translations published, their work will be enriched by the lived experiences that I mention above, including their Taiwanese typhoon holiday. The books that they pitch to publishers will likely be discovered by them and driven by the rich and varied textures of their lives. They will understand parts of a text because of their own encounters. They will be able to translate particular Taiwanese nuances because of their memories, connections and networks. A translator living in Taipei will likely produce a different translation to one living in rural Taiwan or New York City. There is no right or wrong, just different. How exciting is that? Having spent almost 10 years in translation and having seen the process from the training of a translator through to publication, I now read a translated book knowing that every translation is a multiplicity of stories. The story of the author, the text itself, the story of the translator and their reason for translating it, the final translation, the story of the publisher, the story of the funder involved in the project…I could go on. Books don’t just appear in translation without many people driving the process and many decisions taking place that are governed by personal journeys. Without even touching on quality, how many of these powerful and important stories do we risk sacrificing by choosing to remove the human translator from the equation? And what impact will their removal have on the diversity of literature itself?
