For myself, working between two languages as far apart as English and Chinese, I cannot help but feel my visibility when I

For myself, working between two languages as far apart as English and Chinese, I cannot help but feel my visibility when I make choices as fundamental as assigning temporality where it is ambiguous in the source (Chinese has no tenses), deciding whether there are one or many of a given object (Chinese has no plurals), or choosing the gender of a protagonist’s pet (Chinese uses a single gender-neutral pronoun for most animals).

As a translator, I am very much not the “pane of glass” that Norman Shapiro evokes (“You only notice that it’s there when there are little imperfections”). As a translator of plays, I am often present in the rehearsal room, reshaping the dialogue in collaboration with actors and a director. Working mostly with writers who don’t speak English and editors who don’t speak Chinese, I am frequently required to mediate editorial conversations. I supply translator’s notes and footnotes, the latter of which Heather Cleary locates, in ‘The Translator’s Visibility’, “at the intersection of two contradictory mandates: the fidelity of ‘subordinates, slaves, and foreign annotators’ and the autonomy of the commentator, who occupies a position of critical distance”—an in-betweenness I am naturally attracted to.

__