Day of Translation 2025

Event admission is free from noon to 5pm. Please note that seating is limited and available on a first-come, first-seated basis. Registration is required to attend one or all of the three free panels in person or to livestream(opens in a new tab). Everyone who registers will also receive a link to watch the videos a week or two afterwards.

Separate tickets are required for this year’s 6 pm keynote conversation with Jhumpa Lahiri and Katie Kitamura, and advance purchases are highly recommended due to space constraints. We expect to reach capacity. Please note the keynote event will not be livestreamed. Tickets for the keynote are now SOLD OUT.(opens in a new tab)

September is National Translation Month, a time to celebrate the art of translation and the role of translators in connecting cultures and making international literature accessible. On Thursday, September 18, 2025, Center for the Art of Translation will present its 6th annual capstone event, the Day of Translation, at The Center for Fiction in Brooklyn, NY.

The Day of Translation connects readers of literary translation; literary translators at every stage of their careers; and anyone interested in the movement of ideas among languages, cultures, people, and places. This day of conversations about language and literature features provocative panels on translation, broadly defined, and culminates in a keynote conversation featuring Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Jhumpa Lahiri and best-selling author Katie Kitamura (SOLD OUT).

This year’s panels: “Resistance Translation,” a reflection on how translation can help subvert dominant narratives, amplify marginalized voices, and serve as a necessary act of resistance between writing and translating by extending the purview of resistance literature; “Meeting the Present Moment” on translators navigating cultural taboos, censorships, and establishing solidarity; and “Interspecies Translation,” a conversation that begins with the idea of how the languages of the animal, aquatic, and/or natural world can inform the way we understand narrative and storytelling. Panels will be livestreamed worldwide. The keynote event will not be livestreamed.

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?

Writer, translator, and performer Stine An, writer and translator Eirill Alvilde Falck, and writer and translator Khaled Rajeh will share case studies from their work, analyzing problematic translations and examining literary translation’s role in anti-colonial struggles from Palestine to Hong Kong. Moderated by award-winning translator Chenxin Jiang, this conversation will focus on how translation can subvert dominant narratives, amplify marginalized voices, and serve as a necessary act of resistance.

With the rising number of book bans, political scrutiny of education and libraries, and refugees and migrants in limbo across the United States, how do translators navigate linguistic and ideological borders? What does it mean to translate literature in a time of growing censorship and cultural polarization? How can translators respond to book challenges, publisher hesitations, and various aspects of censorship, including self-censorship?

Writer and award-winning translator Anton Hur, writer and Persian translator Parisa Saranj, and writer and translator between Chinese, French, Spanish, and English Jenna Tang will discuss what it means, in concrete terms, to establish or contribute to one’s community through translation and how to deal with recurring issues such as exploitation and burnout. 

What is gained in narrating from the perspective of a polar bear, a clam, or famously, a cockroach? This panel explores the idea of “interspecies translation” and how the languages of the animal, aquatic, and otherwise natural world inform the way we approach narrative and storytelling. Is it more freeing to be a clam than a woman? What happens to a polar bear’s voice when it’s translated both across species and across languages? Will we ever be able to understand animal language? Will they ever understand ours? 

Join Susan Bernofsky (translator of Yoko Tawada’s Memoirs of a Polar Bear, New Directions), Bonnie Chau (All Roads Lead to Blood, 2040 Books), Anelise Chen (Clam Down, One World), and Kate Zambreno (Animal Stories, forthcoming from Transit Books) in a conversation about what translation can teach us about understanding the animal world and vice versa. Moderated by Dr. Elisha Cohn (Milieu: A Creaturely Theory of the Contemporary Novel, Stanford University Press).

Break: Ticket holders will need to exit and re-enter for the keynote event. Proof of purchase required. The venue will release waitlist and walk-in tickets on a first-come, first-served basis, if available. The keynote conversation is at capacity and will not be livestreamed.

Translation, broadly conceived, lies at the heart of the work of Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Jhumpa Lahiri and best-selling author Katie Kitamura. For Lahiri, translation is more than an art; it’s a profound metamorphosis, a radical act of reshaping text and self. Kitamura’s fiction features translators, interpreters, and actors, for whom translation is physical labor, an embodiment of another’s language, and a performance of intimacy. Using translation as their guide, Lahiri and Kitamura will discuss the journey of finding one’s voice in other languages and on the page.