Abstract
The diversity of translated literature in the Anglophone book market is diminishing, rather than growing, with 58% of books published in English translation between 2018 and 2022 coming from ‘the Big Four languages’ (French, Spanish, German, and Italian), compared to 48% from 2008 to 2017, according to the Translation Database. The state of publishing needs to be changed: we deserve a World Literature that showcases diverse voices and does not retrench European hegemony over cultural production, that does not refuse depictions of human experiences beyond the terms and confines it has set for non-Western writing.
To help translators from ‘lesser’ translated languages garner visibility for their work, I propose that we seek new ways of speaking as and for literary translators. As a translator translating from a minor language in international literature (Chinese, my first language) into English (my non-mother tongue), I am ready to use my source-language-tinted voice, my accented English, to interrogate and challenge Anglophone notions of what the world is and who has a right to speak in it. With first-hand experience of life in northeast China (the Chinese Rust Belt), I aim to use my English translations and narration of Chinese Rust Belt literature as the site to speak out against the regime of ‘fluency’, the invisibility/inaudibility of the translator, and the ‘unpublishability’ of so-called ‘low-demand’ minor literature in the World Literature Market.
Drawing on critical theories in literary studies, translation studies and performance studies as well as recent scholarship on audiobooks, my research goes on to redefine the possibilities and significance of the creative voice of the translator, both in and beyond the translated text. It offers a poetics of translating, in the era of media convergence, the ‘getting-real’, ‘going-live’ voices of the authors, characters, and narrators of literary texts in contemporary creative industries into a praxis of the literary translator’s vocal empowerment.
Bio
Yaqi Xi (she/her) is a PhD candidate at the University of Warwick. Her research focuses on English translations of modern Chinese literature. As a practising translator, Yaqi translates from Chinese to English and vice versa. She is the translator of a forthcoming Chinese edition of ‘Golden: The Power of Silence in a World of Noise’, a bestseller by Justin Zorn and Leigh Marz (Cheers Publishing, 2023). She is currently working on her PhD project on translating and audio-remediating contemporary northeast Chinese literature, where she seeks to empower literary translators in cultural industries through creative practices of translation and trans-mediation.
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