Day of Translation 2025: Resistance Translation: The Ethics, Aesthetics, and Politics of Translating Resistance Literature
Stine An, Eirill Alvilde Falck, Khaled Rajeh, and Chexin Jiang focus on how translation can subvert dominant narratives, amplify marginalized voices, and serve as a necessary act of resistance.
On Thursday, September 18, 2025, Center for the Art of Translation presented its annual Day of Translation at The Center for Fiction in Brooklyn, NY. This panel, featuring writer, translator, and performer Stine An, writer and translator Eirill Alvilde Falck, writer and translator Khaled Rajeh, and award-winning translator Chenxin Jiang analyzed problematic translations and examined literary translation’s role in anti-colonial struggles from Palestine to Hong Kong.
How do translators navigate the complex responsibility of serving as political agents while recreating both the aesthetics and the inherent purpose of resistance literature? What strategies enable translators to work toward liberation without catering to colonial tastes? How do you bring Palestinian literature to English readers when those readers are part of the system Palestinian writers are pushing back against?