Born relay translated? Translating Syaman Rapongan’s 'Mata nu Wawa'
Key information
- Date
- Time
-
1:00 pm to 2:30 pm
- Venue
- SOAS Main Building
- Room
- KLT
- Event type
- Seminar
About this event
The Centre of Taiwan Studies is delighted to welcome Dr Darryl Sterk to give a talk as part of this year’s Centre of Taiwan Studies Summer School on Syaman Rapongan’s Mata nu Wawa, relay translation, and the question of what it means for a literary work to be 'born translated'.
This talk will respond to Richard Chen’s stimulating article 'Ethnography, Born-Translated Literature, and Translation' about Syaman Rapongan’s thrilling autobiographical bildungsroman Mata nu Wawa, or Eyes of the Ocean (Columbia University Press, 2025). Chen entertains the author Syaman Rapongan’s claim that he translates from his mother tongue Tao into Mandarin.
In this talk, Dr Darryl Sterk interrogates this claim and evaluates how translators have translated Mata nu Wawa into foreign languages, particularly English. Was Mata nu Wawa born relay translated? Sure, but not in the way that you might think.
Image credit: Ivan Bandura via Unsplash.
About the speaker
Darryl Sterk is associate professor of Translation at Lingnan University in Hong Kong. He studies translation into and out of the Indigenous language Seediq and translates fiction from Taiwan by nature writers such as Wu Ming-Yi. In his free time he enjoys pumping iron and observing nature.
