Translation Tuesday: “Their Eyes are Like That” by Jayant Kaikini

January 20, 2026  |  in Translations  |  by Carol Blaizy D’Souza

The market at dawn rubs out a night with its feet

Have you ever slept with your eyes open? In the Kannada verses of Jayant Kaikini, what might seem like a curse is re-conceived as a gift: in the strange spectacle of people who sleep with their eyes open and unblinking, the speaker of the poem finds a symbol of the slow, deliberate attention we might bring to every second of our waking lives, missing nothing, finding something holy in every mundane thing, “every plant, pillar, post.” Writes translator Carol Blaizy D’Souza, “I have tried to pay special attention to the play woven into his poetry, to preserve the tenderness, the supple freshness of the narrator’s gaze.” Read on!

Their Eyes are Like That

People who are asleep with half-open eyes
Do not wake them up just in jest; their eyes are like that
Like a looted marketplace

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How to Find Your Home: A Review of Tangerinn by Emanuela Anechoum

January 19, 2026  |  in Reviews  |  by Amber Ruth Paulen

Tangerinn is . . . a story of blooming beyond the social images and pressures that can get confused with a meaningful life.

Tangerinn by Emanuela Anechoum, translated from the Italian by Lucy Rand, Europa Editions, 2026

When Mina, the first-person narrator of Emanuela Anechoum’s debut novel Tangerinn, returns to her childhood home in southern Italy after the death of her father, she is argumentative and defensive. She fights with her sister Aisha who picks her up at the airport—about hair removal, head scarves, who knew their father best. Though some of this prickliness could be due to grief, her pre-loss self has already been established as someone quick to judge, who has shored up a levee of self-defense. Mina readily admits to herself that she is a knot of “inadequacy and fear” and is most on edge trying to answer the question of who she really is. Though this query is always loaded, it is particularly so in this novel that takes on the weighty contemporary topics of cross-generational immigration and the social digital landscape.

The beginning of Tangerinn takes place in London and shares resonances with Vicenzo Latronico’s Perfection, published in English earlier this year. Like Mina, Latronico’s couple have moved from Italy to northern Europe and define themselves by their curations—what brands, plants, colors, furniture, and neighborhood they live in. But while the insecurities of Perfection remain mostly placid below this veneer, Mina dislikes her acquiescence to this powerful, social dictate, which is represented by her roommate/mentor/idol Liz. Before Mina receives the call about her dad’s death, she and Liz are having a conversation about envy, at which Mina thinks: “I envy everyone, all the time. I constantly envy people who are beautiful, rich, happy, sure of themselves. I’m full of venom for other people’s privilege, and I also envy their merits. I hope Liz loses everything she has.” Yet Mina must have Liz as her friend, because only Liz—the influencer who has everything—can be the reassurance that she is getting her life in London right.   READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

January 16, 2026  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Ibrahim Fawzy and MARGENTO

The latest literary news from Egypt and Canada!

This week, our editors fill us in on the controversial withholding of a young writers short story prize in Egypt and an exciting new Canadian-led digital humanities initiative. Read on to find out more!

Ibrahim Fawzy, Editor-at-Large, Reporting from Egypt

The announcement of the winners of the twenty-first edition of Egypt’s Sawiris Cultural Awards was quickly overshadowed by the controversy surrounding the jury’s decision to withhold the first prize in the Best Short Story Collection (young writers category). This decision became a public cultural reckoning, reigniting long-simmering questions about literary authority, generational tension, and the role of prizes in a precarious literary ecosystem.

At the center of the controversy were remarks made by the chair of the jury, member Gerges Shoukry, an Egyptian writer and poet, during the awards ceremony. Explaining the decision to withhold the prize, Shoukry stated that “the overwhelming majority of submitted texts lacked the basic principles of the short story,” framing the jury’s decision as a message to young writers that “knowledge is the path to excellence.”

The backlash was swift. On social media, writers emphasized that juries have the right to withhold prizes; what they rejected was the tone of “generalization,” “rebuke,” and “moral instruction” that accompanied the decision. Questions also emerged about the jury’s process: if most submissions were deemed so fundamentally flawed, how did four short story collections make it to the shortlist in the first place? The collections in question were Pet Mice by Nesma Ouda, Violent Love by Hoda Omran, A Distance Fit for Betrayal by Noha El-Shazly, and Death Has Three Knocks by Iman Abu Ghazala. For the writers, the announcement felt less like a neutral judgment and more like a public invalidation of their efforts. READ MORE…

Cairo Without Euphemism: An Interview with Belal Fadl and Osama Hammad

January 15, 2026  |  in Interviews  |  by Ibrahim Fawzy

Don’t even think about taboos, or moral values. If you do . . . you’ll stop focusing on the act of storytelling.

In The Completely True Tales of Um Mimi and Sharawi the Adulterer, Egyptian screenwriter and author Belal Fadl introduces the underground of Cairo with fierce humor and unbridled intensity, drawing on the vividity of vulgarity and the frenzy of the marginalized to capture the explosive nature of the capital. The book was banned in Egypt, though achieved notoriety beyond the nation for both its style and content, lauded for its refusal to censor or sanitize. In this interview, Fadl and translator Osama Hammad speak to us about authorial honesty, the book’s colorful reputation, and about what it means to face reality in fiction.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title.

Ibrahim Fawzy (IF): Belal, how did The Completely True Tales of Um Mimi and Sharawi the Adulterer first come into being?

Belal Fadl (BF): It grew out of my personal experience as a student at Cairo University in the 1990s—though I wasn’t thinking of it as a novel. Like many other writers, I believed my first novel had to be epic, something like Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. You start with imitating the works that impress you, and only later do you discover your own voice. García Márquez’s greatest tip is to write what you know.

When I started writing short stories during my journalism work in 1995–96, I tried—unsuccessfully—to write a story about a barber called Sharawi (from the Arabic word for hair). I don’t know why I chose him, but maybe because a barber can be such a distinctive character. I failed, but I felt that the material belonged to something longer and deeper. READ MORE…

The Choice to Write: A Review of A Fictional Inquiry by Daniele Del Giudice

January 14, 2026  |  in Reviews  |  by Ria Dhull

Del Giudice recreates an existing landscape in miniature to play around with his protagonist.

A Fictional Inquiry by Daniele Del Giudice, translated from the Italian by Anne Milano Appel, New Vessel Press, 2025

A Fictional Inquiry, Daniele Del Giudice’s first novel, is called Lo Stadio di Wimbledon (Wimbledon Stadium) in its original Italian—a reference to the end, when the protagonist journeys to Wimbledon to finish his, as translator Anne Milano Appel puts it, “inquiry.” The English title is clever; it places the conundrum of Del Giudice’s story right on the cover.

The titular inquiry is regarding the Triestean writer Roberto Bazlen, whose novels were published posthumously. The unnamed protagonist of A Fictional Inquiry travels first to Trieste and then to London, trying to understand why Bazlen did not or could not write while he was alive: “‘How did he hit upon the fact of not writing?’ I ask. ‘I mean the fact that he only wrote in private?’” Obviously, this inquiry concerns a writer of fiction, but it is not solely a question about what it means to write fiction; in a double meaning, the man’s inquiry is itself fictional, tossed out to the reader to cover up the protagonist’s (or Del Giudice’s) other, hidden, purpose.

This character arrives in Trieste with the supposed goal of interviewing Bazlen’s surviving friends and colleagues. He claims, during these encounters, to be gathering information in order to figure out why Bazlen never revealed himself as a writer, and as a result, these conversations map out his subject’s literary life. For some reason, however, the man is continually uninterested in the conversations he’s having. While speaking to a poet in her hospital room, he thinks: “I don’t care to listen to anymore; I want to leave, but I’m anxious about the formalities.” Before and during other meetings, he is just as hesitant. When asked if he is available to see a person of interest on that day, he responds: “Yes of course,” even while admitting to us that: “Truthfully I don’t know if I want to.” READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “A Full Meal” by Nam Cao

January 13, 2026  |  in Translations  |  by Brett Wertz

How simple life would be if people didn’t have to eat. But food never just jumps into your mouth—you have to work for it.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we bring you a short story by Vietnamese writer Nam Cao, translated by Brett Wertz. Detailing the twilight years of an old woman, it lays bare the brutal calculus of a life spent in poverty, where maternal labor is an investment that yields few returns. Betrayed by her aging body, and unable to make a living in a world that has no use for her, she slowly gives into starvation. Nam Cao’s unflinching style, with its refusal to moralize or dole out happy endings, can make for a discomfiting read—but it presents a realistic portrait of the harshness of village life. A year after “A Full Meal” was published, the worst famine in modern Vietnamese history would begin, eventually claiming the lives of up to two million people, including one of the author’s own children.

The old woman cried out for her dead son all through the night. It was always like that—whenever she came to the end of the road, with no more ways to make ends meet, she would cry out for him. She wailed as if it was his fault she should be hungry now. And indeed it was. Her husband had died just as the boy slid from her womb, and so she raised the tiny little toddling thing on her own. It was her hope that she might be able to rely on the boy when she was old and weak. But before she had the chance to ask for even the smallest thing, he up and died. Her labor had been wasted.

The boy’s wife was inhuman. She had no compassion at all for her old mother-in-law! She remarried at once, hardly pausing to mourn her dead husband. Then, she abandoned their five-year-old daughter, leaving her with the old woman to raise, stooped and bent as she was. Thus, at nearly seventy years old, the old woman had no choice but to take her granddaughter in. She’d already given both flesh and bone for her son, and now would give all that was left for her granddaughter. What more could she hope for?

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What’s New in Translation: January 2026

January 12, 2026  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Anna Mebel, Dan Shurley, Fani Avramopoulou, Hilary Ilkay, Mandy-Suzanne Wong, Nicole Yurcaba, Randle Browning, and Xiao Yue Shan

New titles from China, France, Peru, Italy, Romania, Brazil, South Korea, Mexico, Sweden, and Japan!

Looks like 2026 isn’t coming in slow. Despite the chaos, we’re looking forward to another year of illuminating the best of what world literature has to share—and we’re starting off with plenty to go around, with thirteen titles from ten countries. Find in the mix a new translation of one of the Peruvian canon’s most dazzling and convulsive works; a novel depicting the delicate indigenous customs of a region between Siberia and northeast China; a shocking, propulsive novella from a Japanese cult writer; a story of transformative grief from an enthralling Romanian voice, and so much more.

The Last Quarter of the Moon by Chi Zijian, translated from the Chinese by Bruce Humes, Milkweed Editions, 2026

Review by Mandy-Suzanne Wong

The opening lines of Chi Zijian’s wondrous novel, The Last Quarter of the Moon, set a carefully measured tone for this enchanted story of Evenki nomads: “A long-time confidante of the rain and snow, I am ninety years old. The rain and snow have weathered me, and I too have weathered them.” t6his rich and essential passage gently, and with deference, opens a window into a world where humans confide in rain. Chi and translator Bruce Humes indulge the word weather in at least three of its meanings, conveying the narrator’s resilience and hinting at her costly intimacy with other-than-human energies.

A word exchanging its meaning for other meanings—as if adopting different bodies to slide between existential contexts—invokes the dynamism of the shamanic Evenki cosmos, wherein earth and sky, humans and nonhumans, the embodied and the disembodied, dance together in precarious balance and tender reciprocity. Everything is alive in the Evenki’s animist multiverse, every entity ensouled, each Earthling an embodiment of the Spirits, and every human owes a debt to the Spirits for the lives of nonhumans killed for food. In turn, when a human child goes missing, in danger of freezing to death, a reindeer child must go “to the dark realm on [the human’s] behalf,” in a mimetic exchange.

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Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

January 9, 2026  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Hongyu Jasmine Zhu, and Kathryn Raver

The latest literary news from France, China, and the Philippines!

This week, our editors report on the cancellation of a controversial comics festival in France; the Arabic-language launch of an important literary account of Spanish colonization; and the awardees from one of China’s most prestigious prizes in children’s literature. Read on to find out more!

Kathryn Raver, Assistant Managing Editor, reporting from France

The fifty-third annual Angoulême International Comics Festival—a renowned celebration of comics and graphic novels slated to take place January 29 – February 1, and which I have written about for Asymptote twice in the past—has been cancelled for 2026. Save for one cancellation due to the COVID-19 pandemic, this is the first time in the festival’s history that it will not be taking place.

The festival’s organizers, a group called 9e Art+, announced the news in early December, asserting that this cancellation is due to lack of funding. However, authors and contributors—including Anouk Ricard, the winner of the festival’s grand prix last year—have been raising calls to boycott the festival for the past few months following multiple ignored sexual assault cases, un-transparent business practices, and commercial excess. Over four hundred authors called for a boycott in April of 2025, and multiple others have joined the call in the time since. READ MORE…

The Radicality of the Fracture: A Review of What Remains by Leylâ Erbil

January 8, 2026  |  in Reviews  |  by Hilary Ilkay

Erbil is a chronicler of the cracks, of what disrupts a sense of wholeness and cohesion but also evades hegemonic structures of conformity.

What Remains by Leylâ Erbil, translated by Alev Ersan, Mark David Wyers, and Amy Marie Spangler, Deep Vellum, 2025

In 2022, the publication of A Strange Woman (Tuhaf Bir Kadın) introduced the renowned Turkish writer and activist Leylâ Erbil to the Anglophone literary world, a step made possible by the efforts of translators Nermin Menemencioğlu and Amy Marie Spangler. What Remains (Kalan) now gives us a new side of Erbil—her first novel, characteristic with her uncompromising commitment to exploring the taboo. In a delightful moment of parallelism, Maureen Freeley’s translation of Journey to the Edge of Life by Tezer Özlü, one of Erbil’s most beloved friends and regular correspondents, came out in April, making 2025 a watershed year for Turkish women writers in translation.

Ayten Tartıcı’s insightful introduction to What Remains sets the stage beautifully, giving the reader enough context to get a sense of Erbil and her work while preserving room for mystery and surprise. Born in 1931, Erbil grew up in Istanbul and was an autodidact who did not believe in shutting herself inside the ivory tower of academia. She read widely, immersed in the work of her Turkish contemporaries but also global thinkers and writers like Kafka, Proust, Freud, Faulkner, and Marx. Undeniably a brilliant and prolific writer (as the first Turkish woman to be nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature), she was passionate, opinionated, and politically engaged in both her texts and her life, advocating for freedom of expression in Turkey and beyond. READ MORE…

The Four Colours of Blood: An Interview with Norah Alkharashi and Yasmine Haj on the Arabic Poetry of Love and War

January 7, 2026  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

The more we bridge our languages, the more effective our collective resistance can be.

In Arabic, the word for ‘love’ (حب) is nearly identical to the word for ‘war’ (حرب), differing by just one letter. The nearness and linguistic kinship between these two words is a felicitous metaphor for the tropes examined in the poetry anthology Arabic, between Love and War, published by Tkaronto, Canada-based trace press.

Arabic, Between Love and War assembles important voices from across the Arabophone world, such as Nour Balousha of Palestine, Najlaa Osman Eltom of Sudan, Rana Issa of Lebanon, Qasim Saudi of Iraq, as well as diasporic Arab poets in Canada, the United Kingdom, Sweden, and the United States. Edited by Palestinian poet Yasmine Haj and Saudi translator-scholar Norah Alkharashi, the anthology features poems translated from Arabic into English and vice versa, a number of which have garnered accolades such as the Lambda Literary Award, Atheer Poetry Prize, Arab American Book Award, and appeared in poetry collections published in Damascus, Beirut, Juba, California, Basrah, Algiers, and beyond.

In this interview, I spoke with both Haj (in Paris, France) and Alkharashi (in Ottawa, Canada) about the anthology and the ways in which the poetry of love and poetry of war converge.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): Congratulations to both of you on this riveting anthology, Arabic, between Love and War! How did this book come to be, and how is it particularly relevant and urgent today?

Yasmine Haj (YH): Thank you, Sam. This book is the epilogue to a workshop organised by trace press, ‘translating [x]’, in which Norah and I co-facilitated six online sessions on literary translation from Arabic. As we structured the workshop, we were drawn to the aesthetic of the words love and war in Arabic, and how the removal of one letter throws one word into its apparent opposite. We discussed the idea with the participants, some of which mentioned how tired they were of our world being discussed through the prism of war. This was in late 2022, early 2023, before Zionism heightened its genocide of Gaza and any reminder of indigeneity. We had no idea we would be editing this volume, with all its submissions, as we watched Palestine oscillate between those very two words, and other genocided lands fluctuate right along with it. Love of land, of people, and war waged upon that very existence, have been ongoing for more than a century, adding to the six hundred years of imperial annihilation and substitution. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Stray Dog” by Sadegh Hedayat

January 6, 2026  |  in Translations  |  by Manoo Mofidi

Two winters had passed since he’d sunk into this hellhole, since he’d had a proper meal, a comfortable sleep.

One person’s suffering is, very often, someone else’s joke. Pat, the dog at the center of this week’s Translation Tuesday, has never spoken with a human being, but he understands this well. Following an accident that separates him from his owner, Pat’s life is reduced to a pathetic spectacle in Varameen square, begging for scraps of food from a crowd of shopkeepers and street vendors who think it good luck to beat him often, their enthusiastic cruelty only escalating as Pat’s body and mind deteriorate. What follows is, at once, a powerful meditation on the suffering of non-human animals and an indictment of human cruelty in the face of nature’s capriciousness. Written in blunt, sensuous prose by Sadegh Hedayat and elegantly translated by Manoo Mofidi, “Stray Dog” is sure to haunt and alarm. Read on.

A few small stores—a bakery; a butcher shop; an apothecary; a coffee shop; and a barber shop, all of which there to halt hunger and provide life’s basic daily needs—formed Varameen Square. The Square and its people, under the brutal sun, half-burned, half-naked, longed for dusk’s first breeze and the evening shade. The people, the shops, the trees, the animals were all lethargic. The hot air weighed heavy, and a soft dust haze undulated in the cerulean sky, with the car traffic adding to its density.

On one side of the Square stood an ancient sycamore tree, trunk hollowed, bark frayed, but which, with ever more stubbornness, had stretched out its crooked and sickly branches. A wide platform had been set up under the shade of the dusty leaves of the tree, where a couple of kids were selling rice pudding and pumpkin seeds, lyrically beckoning passersby. A thick, muddy water toiled its way through the brook in front of the coffee house.

The only structure that stood out was the famous tower of Varameen, half of whose cracked cylindrical body could be seen with a cone on top. The sparrows nesting in the crevices of its fallen bricks were napping, having been silenced by the heat. Only the intermittent cries of an approaching dog broke the quiet.

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Graveyards as Palimpsests: A Review of Mariana Enríquez’s Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave

January 5, 2026  |  in Reviews  |  by Darius Sobhani

The book does not merely document—it exhumes, observing death and its afterlives with a unique combination of spirituality and doubt.

Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave by Mariana Enríquez, translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell, Hogarth, 2025

On a visit to St. Louis Cemetery No. 1, in New Orleans, the narrator of Mariana Enríquez’s Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave describes a particular site: ‘Another grave has a sign that says “Crime happened here” in red, but the story, which is detailed on the lower part of the sign, is illegible, washed away by the rain.’ With this image, the Argentinian author provides the perfect analogy for her approach in this most recent non-fiction. In historical and literary terms, a palimpsest is a manuscript page—typically made of parchment—that has been scraped clean to be reused for new writing. However, the original ink often left ghostly remains—faint traces of the earlier writing bleeding through the new surface. Just as a palimpsest may contain multiple eras of writing on a single sheet, the graveyard is a site where history is simultaneously layered and scraped away by neglect. Thus for Enríquez, the graveyard is the ultimate palimpsest: a site where the past remains waiting for a sensitive traveller to decipher its remnants, akin to a medium searching for spirits.

In summary, Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave is a compilation of personal anecdotes that take place in specific cemeteries, with chapters set in Georgia (the state), New Orleans, Paris, and Guadalajara, among others. These places become testing grounds for the notion of graveyard as palimpsest, a methodological effect winningly achieved through Enríquez’s standout narration, which reads as equally friendly and eccentric, with a bleakly comic outlook and a fascination with the supernatural, while also tinged with a hardened scepticism. She is not any mere tourist of the morbid, but someone with a deep, almost joyful affinity, for the macabre. This odd combination of credulity and cynicism is best illustrated in the chapter detailing her visit to the cemeteries of Savannah, Georgia. During a visit to Conrad Aiken’s grave, the narrator recounts the horrific predicament of his family—how he was orphaned as a toddler after his father murdered his mother and subsequently committed suicide—but frames it within a series of casual remarks. Rather than expounding at length on the gruesome story, Enríquez mentions the grave with a peripatetic levity, recounting it amongst the perceptions of other graves that she walks by, noting: ‘Aiken’s grave isn’t the only one with a bench—Johnny Mercer also invites you to sit down.’ READ MORE…

Widening the River of Hindi Poetry: An Interview with Sourav Roy and Tuhin Bhowal

January 1, 2026  |  in Interviews  |  by Devi Sastry

The contemporary moment turned out to be far richer and more diverse than we'd anticipated.

Edited by writer-translators Sourav Roy and Tuhin Bhowal, Perennial: The Red River Book of 21st Century Hindi Poetry anthologises the work of forty poets, with a team of twenty-six translators, providing a glimpse into the diverse voices that animate Hindi poetry today. As Roy notes in his introduction—which wonderfully contextualises the history and development of Hindi’s poetic traditions, as well as their intersections with global literary movements—the language can be imagined as a vast and brimming river. As an anglophone reader myself, this collection offered an inlet to its ever-changing currents, with reflections from writers across the length and breadth of India, and beyond. From lyrical odes to political satire, folklore to philosophy, Perennial offers an entry point into Hindi poetry’s contemporary dynamism.

In this interview, I spoke with Roy and Bhowal about their approach to the project as co-editors and translators, possibilities for fidelity and creative betrayal in translation, and what comes next for Hindi poetry.

Devi Sastry (DS): This anthology must have been a massive undertaking, compiling two hundred poems from forty contemporary Hindi poets. Can you share a little bit about the making of this collection? What was the impetus behind the project? What challenges and discoveries did you encounter along the way?

Sourav Roy (SR): Perennial began with a phone call from Dibyajyoti Sarma, the publisher of Red River, in 2019. The impetus was straightforward; there has been no major recent anthology introducing contemporary Hindi poetry to English readers. We initially envisioned a smaller, more manageable project—perhaps twenty poets, completed within a year, but as we began reading, the scope expanded organically. The contemporary moment turned out to be far richer and more diverse than we’d anticipated.

Tuhin Bhowal (TB): I’m still not sure about the massiveness of this undertaking, but we certainly did take a long time—more than five years by the time the book came out in print. To be honest, I did not start with any such impetus in mind, or what the project actually meant, because literature clambered into my head very late in life (my mid-twenties). I had moved to Bangalore in 2017, and I began reading contemporary Hindi poetry seriously in the following year. I got incredibly interested in translation, but I was a complete novice, so in the beginning, I was just excited at the opportunity to work as peers on a full-length book with someone like Sourav, who had already been delving deeply into Hindi and English literature—reading, writing, translating—for so many years. READ MORE…

Our Top Ten Articles of 2025, as Chosen by You: #1 Translation, AI, and the Political Weight of Words by Daniel Saldaña París

December 31, 2025  |  in News  |  by Haajar Abu Ismail

París mediates on translation through AI, where questions of ethics and effectivity take center-stage—can AI do as we do, but better?

It follows that our most anticipated and widely read work of 2025, tackles the most batted topic of the year: AI. Daniel Saldaña París’s “Translation, AI, and the Political Weight of Words” (tr. Christina MacSweeney) tackles it head-on in an interesting project for Cita Press, and shares his reflections in a thought-provoking essay published in the Summer issue.

For context, Cita Press is an open access publishing project that “pairs contemporary authors and designers with public domain or open-licensed texts to create a free online library of carefully designed books by women, in Spanish and in English.” The project at hand, the “Literary Translation & Technology Project,” involves using  AI (Large Language Models, Neural Language Models, and Machine Translators), traditional translation tools, and of course, a literary translator to evaluate AI’s potential for creating open access editions of works in translation. París took on a Spanish translation of Ten Days in a Mad-House by Nellie Bly. In this piece, they mediate on translation through AI, where questions of ethics and effectivity take center-stage—can AI do as we do, but better?

Exactly how revolutionary is this new technology in terms of our profession? Based on my one-off experience of translating Diez días en un manicomio, I can say that the benefits are limited to speeding up the translation process while not necessarily improving it.

. . .

When choosing the most appropriate translation of a particular phrase or sentence, I keep in mind the readership of the text, in addition to its social function: I don’t make the same decisions when translating for a Spanish publishing house as I would for an independent Latin American publisher, or for an open access project that will be consulted by Spanish-speakers of different origins who are unfamiliar with my version of the language. At the other extreme, when translating, I am also conscious of the historical immutability of the original: I am working with a text written in 1887 and I must retain certain usages of that context, even when this may shock our contemporary political sensibilities. 

First, París stresses the unacknowledged and unpaid labor concerning the body of work that trains AI. Given that this work is largely skewed to texts by male authors, there is an inherent gender bias in AI results. This would likely apply to translating the subtleties of minority-specific content that the software isn’t adequately trained to handle. Not to mention, were you aware that “each ChatGPT consultation uses two glasses of water?”

READ MORE…