Thanks to Taiwanese author Yang Shuang-Zi and Taiwanese-American translator Lin King’s great work Taiwan Travelogue, which won the 2026 International Booker Prize, suddenly everybody is talking about translation — the art and the craft, the popularity of translated books, the real and imagined threat posed by AI translation, and even the protagonists of books and films who are translators or interpreters.
It is great to see people paying attention to translators. In a short article titled “Found in translation” published via “Bookmarks”, the e-newsletter from The Guardian (@guardian), the author (Ella Creamer? ) mentions several books with translators and interpreters as protagonists who are “interstitial figures, forming a cultural or interpersonal bridge”. The article cites Lauren Elkin (@lauren_elkin_), a French and American writer and translator, as saying: “The French have a great term for this – avoir le cul entre deux chaises – or being stuck between two chairs, never quite fully sitting in either.” To me, it well describes the “very rich and slightly uncomfortable position” occupied by those working in and between two or more languages/cultures.
Then, this being the age of AI, the aforementioned e-newsletter has to mention an article by the aforementioned Ella Creamer (X: @ella_louise_c) on how human translators are in danger of being replaced by AI. Titled “Survey finds generative AI proving major threat to the work of translators“, the article mentions a curious distinction between “literary” and “commercial” translation. “’The work that has presumably been handed over to AI will be the kind of uncomplicated bread-and-butter stuff which doesn’t require so much nuance,’ such as instruction manuals, while ‘Idiomatic, knotty and complex writing” is likely to remain with human translators’.”
That article contains a link to another piece of writing by John Self (@johnself1) that discusses the “boom in popularity” of translated books, which is titled “‘It’s exciting, it’s powerful: how translated fiction captured a new generation of readers“. This is where I found my quote of the day. It came from Irish translator and writer Frank Wynne:
“Our generation [born in the 1960s] suffered from the notion that translated fiction was like castor oil: not very pleasant but probably good for you. And it shouldn’t be good for you, or bad for you, or anything else. What people are looking for is to engage with a book.”
“Reading is about discovery, and reading outside your own culture challenges your view of the world – something young people are wired to do more readily than older readers. ‘Young people today,’ Wynne suggests, ‘are less wary of the idea that a book is in translation. If it’s exciting, if it’s powerful, if it speaks to them, why wouldn’t they read it?’“
Voices under the Sun 陽光下的聲音 