Translating Taiwan and Riding the Iron Horse of Fate in Nature: An Interview with Darryl Sterk

AbstractOn October 7, 2022, Darryl Sterk, a prolific Chinese-English literary translator, paid a virtual visit to my translation course at the University of Hong Kong. Students came ready to discuss Sterk’s translations of Wu Ming-yi’s The Stolen Bicycle (Danche shiqie ji, 2017), Sakinu Ahronglong’s Hunter School (Shanzhu feishu Sakenu, 2020), and Kevin Chen’s Ghost Town (Gui difang, 2022). I curated these three texts to consider the relationship between translation and minority issues in Taiwan from environmental, indigenous, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender angles. But my students had their own questions, which they later transcribed and edited, along with Sterk’s responses. The result is an eclectic mix of topics that deal with the technical aspects of Chinese-English translation, such as code-switching, machine translation, translation of Chinese topolects (fangyan), relay translation, romanization, and translator’s notes, as well as the cultural, historical, and even environmental aspects of Chinese-English translation. AcknowledgmentI thank my students for being so engaged throughout this interview process. They are Au Woon Yue (Denise), Cheng Suet Ching (Lacus), Cheuk Tsz Ching (Elena), Cheung Ho Yin (Ivan), Choy Kwan Ki (Mathias), Leung Yan Ki (Otilie), Tam Yan Chi (Tom), Wong Hon Lam (Charlotte), Jodie Wong, and Xiang Haiyin (Allie).Notes1 Darryl Sterk, “Compromises in Translating Wu Ming-Yi’s Uncompromising Localism,” Ex-position, no. 41 (June 2019): 151–52.2 Darryl Sterk, “An Ecotranslation Manifesto: On the Translation of Bionyms in Nativist and Nature Writing from Taiwan,” Chinese Environmental Humanities: Practices of Environing at the Margins, ed. Chia-ju Chang (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 134.Additional informationNotes on contributorsNicholas Y. H. WongDarryl Sterk is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Translation at Lingnan University in Hong Kong. He teaches Chinese-English translation, contrastive analysis, and composition. He has translated works of fiction by Taiwanese writers such as Egoyan Zheng, Lay Chih-Ying, Sakinu Ahronglong, and Horace Ho. Notable translations include Wu Ming-Yi’s The Man with the Compound Eyes, which inspired Darryl to try to turn himself into a naturalist, and The Stolen Bicycle, which was longlisted for the International Booker Prize. His latest translations are Lee Wei-Jing’s The Mermaid’s Tale and Kevin Chen’s Ghost Town. As a scholar, he studies translation between Mandarin Chinese and the Taiwan indigenous language Seediq, and has written a monograph entitled Indigenous Cultural Translation: A Thick Description of Seediq Bale, on the process of translation that made the epic film Seediq Bale possible.Nicholas Y. H. Wong is an Assistant Professor in the School of Chinese at the University of Hong Kong. He teaches Chinese-English translation and has translated fiction and essays by Huang Chong-kai, Li Tuo, Zhang Chengzhi, Chan Yeong Siew, and A Leng. In addition to the Taiwanese Huang Chong-kai, he has written essays on Mahua, or Sinophone Malaysian, writers such as Ng Kim Chew, Sha Qin, and Li Zishu, and the Nanyang, or South Seas, historian Hsu Yun-Tsiao. He is now writing a book on the relationship between extractive capitalism and Southeast Asian Chinese writing, with a focus on Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, and Indonesia. He also writes poetry under his pen name Zhou Sivan, and his three chapbooks are Zero Copula (2015), Sea Hypocrisy (2016), and The Geometry of Trees (2022).