The American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) announced the mentees for the 2022 Emerging Translator Mentorship Program. Selected for "Literature from Taiwan," Sandra Chen will be translating a collection of prose essays titled "Watching-Go (目送)" by Taiwanese author Lung Ying-tai (龍應台), who is also the former culture minister.
Chen is an emerging translator from the San Francisco Bay Area, with proficiency in English, Chinese, and French. She is currently an undergraduate student at Princeton University, where she is pursuing a concentration in Comparative Literature and a certificate in Translation and Intercultural Communication.
During the program, 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.
“Watching-Go” 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. 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 13 selected emerging translators are from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, South Korea, Singapore, Japan, and India. For more information about the mentees for the ALTA Emerging Translator Mentorship Program, please visit ALTA’s
website.