Central to the monolingual paradigm is the cherished notion of the “mother tongue”: the single, home language instilled from birth. “This particular vision does not want to admit. . . the ability to live multiple belongings,” writes Yasemin Yildiz in her landmark 2012 Beyond the Mother Tongue. Angles, who translates from Japanese and has also won high honors in Japan for his poetry written in Japanese, and de la Torre, a poet who has written in and translated from both Spanish and English, discussed the joys and perils of their personal linguistic multiplicity.

What strategies might inform our practice of translating queer literature, and what are the ethical implications of doing so? How might we draw on our own experiences of U.S. queer cultures in our work, and how might doing so reinforce American queer cultural hegemony? What structures might we as queer translators and writers want to build together in the future? Listen to the conversation, as we seek to move beyond issues of representation to discuss projects and processes related to queer literature in translation.

As technology has permeated every aspect of our lives, how has it affected literary translation? Hear from three of the most engaged industry professionals about the ways in which they have used data and technology to raise awareness and to determine what and who gets translated, as well as the promises and dangers that it represents for the future.

The global success of Bong Joon Ho’s Oscar-winning Parasite confirmed a dramatic shift in what stories movie audiences across the world, and those in the United States, are willing to embrace as “universal.” Subtitlers, particularly those who make subtitles in the lingua franca that is English, play a crucial role in rendering films intelligible for such global reception. Parasite’s subtitler Darcy Paquet assessed this intricate art with Linda Hoaglund, a bilingual film director and producer and the subtitler of 250 Japanese films, including Miyazaki’s Spirited Away and Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, and award-winning writer-director Xiaolu Guo (She, a Chinese, UFO in Her Eyes) responded from a filmmaker’s perspective.

Translating the Future continued its dismantling of the monolingual paradigm, inspired by Yasemin Yildiz’s landmark 2012 Beyond the Mother Tongue and the work of Bruna Dantas Lobato. This event featured Cameroonian novelist Eric Tsimi, who writes in French and English and speaks a host of other languages; Boris Dralyuk, translator from the Russian and executive editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books; and poet, translator, and memoirist Rajiv Mohabir.

What is lost when a language is lost? How can all that the language meant be conveyed to someone outside its community of speakers? Martin Puchner, whose forthcoming book is on Rotwelsch—a secret thieves’ cant of the Central European underworld—discusses linguistic hauntings with Peter Constantine, a terminal speaker of Arvanitika, spoken in the Corinthian mountains of southern Greece.

What makes a successful book in translation? Have you ever wondered how many people are involved in various stages and how many pieces need to fall into place for an astonishing work of literary translation to make it into the hands and hearts of readers? Sponsored by Middlebury Language Schools.

Literary translation was once a lonely profession, but translators no longer need toil in isolation. All manner of communities have sprung up to support translators and literature in translation. These speakers have founded blogs, publications, and databases, as well as collectives and reading series—both virtual and local—to fill the gaps and meet the needs of translators, editors, booksellers, and readers. Sponsored by Middlebury Language Schools.

Translating the Future continued its dismantling of the monolingual paradigm, inspired by Yasemin Yildiz’s landmark 2012 Beyond the Mother Tongue and the work of Bruna Dantas Lobato. This event featured Janet Hong, writer and translator from the Korean; Pierre Joris, poet, essayist, editor, and translator from various languages; and María José Giménez, poet, translator, and editor.

Languages are often identified with the countries where they are spoken, but for many languages, there is no one-to-one correspondence with any nation or state; the borders are unclear, contested, or unrecognized. How do speakers and students of such languages define themselves, engage with history, and examine the linguistic and cultural continuity embedded in them? What is the place and role of non-native speakers in these language communities? What does translation mean for them? How do these languages alter or enrich the languages and literatures that absorb or surround them? This conversation explored Yiddish, Frisian, Catalan, and beyond. Sponsored by the Institut Ramon Llull and the Yiddish Book Center.

It has been said that every generation deserves its own translation of literary classics. But who decides when it’s time for a new version, and by whom? How are these texts in dialogue with each other? What can these new editions tell us about ourselves? This conversation was about translating and writing through classic works from Sanskrit, Tamil, and Chinese.

Authors bear witness to trauma as a means of reckoning with it. And translations of such texts bring atrocities to light for readers in other languages. Choosing to translate this work is vital, but it can also take a toll on the body and mind of the translator. Three acclaimed translators talked about their experiences with narratives of conflict from recent history and the strategies they have used to bring these stories to us.

Moving between languages is inevitably a political process, one that involves many forms of advocacy. Whether that means translating writers whose work is censored in their own languages and countries, promoting language justice locally within multilingual urban communities, or making choices within the text of a translation that challenge preconceived notions and advocate for new perspectives, translators—even those who may not be quite conscious of this fact—are activists.

For the final event in our Tuesday conversation series, and the first event of Translating the Future’s culminating week, we heard from luminaries Kate Briggs, author of This Little Art; and former U.S. poet laureate Tracy K. Smith, whose forthcoming book, co-translated with Changtai Bi, is Yi Lei’s My Name Will Grow Wide Like a Tree. Sponsored by the Princeton University Program in Translation & Intercultural Communication.

To walk down almost any New York City street is to move through a shifting constellation of languages. Nearly half of all New Yorkers speak a language other than English at home, and close to a quarter don’t speak much English. Nevertheless, a monolingual paradigm persists in narratives of the city’s history and literature disseminated by its most prominent cultural and media institutions, which often portray non-English speakers as newcomers, recent arrivals, outsiders, or interlopers. Though its remarkable linguistic diversity has been a characteristic of the city for as long as it has existed, New Yorkers have come under attack in their own streets and subways for speaking languages that sounded “foreign” to Anglophone monolinguals. This evening’s speakers brought together just a few of the many threads of New York’s richly multilingual history.

What does it mean to retranslate ancient classics for a present in crisis and to produce feminist translations of works understood as iconically male? Maria Dahvana Headley (whose new Beowulf has just appeared) and Emily Wilson (translator of The Odyssey, now at work on The Iliad) joined Literary Translating at Columbia (LTAC) Director Susan Bernofsky for a far-ranging conversation on the radical practice of making translation a space of resistance and joy.

Democracy means different things to each of us. In this perilous time for language, as Natalie Diaz describes it, what multiplicity of forms does the struggle to liberate ourselves from structurally embedded violence take? How much does democracy need translation, and what role do translation and multilingualism play in our democracy? This conversation featured MacArthur Award-winning poet Natalie Diaz; Ken Liu, author of The Dandelion Dynasty series and translator of Chinese science fiction; and Marilyn Nelson, award-winning poet, translator, and author of How I Discovered Poetry.

When Olga Tokarczuk was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, readers all over the world were able to celebrate because her writing has been translated into dozens of languages. Tokarczuk has been hugely appreciative of the remarkable individuals who have done this work, writing, “It’s hard for me to express the relief that comes with being able to share authorship with someone,” in an essay titled—in Jennifer Croft’s translation—“How Translators Are Saving The World.” This landmark event brought together 12 of these talented people—working from Polish to English, Japanese, Hindi, Ukrainian, German, Czech, Norwegian, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, and Romanian—to compare and contrast their experiences working with this challenging and dynamic author over the course of her career. This prismatic lens offers an extraordinary opportunity to examine the art of translation across languages and borders. Sponsored by the Polish Cultural Institute New York, the Boston University Center for the Humanities, the Princeton University Program in Translation & Intercultural Communication, and the East Central European Center at Columbia University.