The American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) announced the mentees for the 2022 Emerging Translator Mentorship Program. The 13 selected emerging translators are from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, South Korea, Singapore, Japan, and India, within which Sandra Chen from the San Francisco Bay Area, was selected for “Literature from Taiwan.” She is expected to work closely for 9 months with the American translator Steve Bradbury as her mentor. The mentorship will conclude with a presentation of her translation work at the annual ALTA conference in the fall of 2022.
Since its inception in 2015, the program has supported translators from various languages. This year, ALTA partners with the Taiwan Academy of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Los Angeles to select emerging translators of literature from Taiwan. The selected mentee, Sandra Chen, is proficient in English, Chinese, and French. She currently studies Comparative Literature and Translation and Intercultural Communication at Princeton University. For the ALTA mentorship program, Sandra intends to work on the translation of 目送, which she has chosen to render as Watching-Go, by Taiwanese writer and cultural critic Lung Ying-tai, who is the first Minister of Culture of Taiwan. Different from the critical essay genre for which Lung is most well-known, this book centers around Lung’s personal affection, in which she writes about her father dying, her mother aging, and her son pulling away. Sandra believes that through her translation of Lung’s delicate depiction of piercing honesty and radical empathy, the universal themes of compassion, mercy and love can be utterly conveyed to English-language readers. She is very excited to work with Steve Bradbury.
Founded in 1978, ALTA is an organization in the United States dedicated exclusively to literary translation. With over 900 members, including individual translators, academic institutions, and presses, it holds the annual ALTA conference to bring together international attendees working in literary translation to bridge cultural communication and understanding among countries and languages.