So, my translation of Roesin by Wu Guan won the short form Rosetta Award for SFF translation! I was so honored to win this award because this was my first introduction to translating SFF from Chinese, and it was also a very challenging piece to translate. The Rosetta Awards are given by the Future Affairs Administration (FAA), to recognize the burgeoning field of SFF translation around the world.
You can read the award-winning short story in Future SF, a wonderful magazine that brings Science Fiction and Fantasy from other languages into English. It’s been an honor working with Alex, the editor, on the piece.
First of all, it was a very tricky piece to translate because the author replaced a lot of the “ren” (man/human) radicals with “jin” (metal/gold) radicals throughout the piece. I invented a set of pronouns for the machine characters that had these changes, as well as appending -tron to the nouns that referred to them. The story itself is mesmerizing and a total page turner, about a machine artist that trains a humiliated human to become his double in a John Lennon/Yoko Ono-esque piece of performance art. If that doesn’t pique your curiosity I don’t know what will!
Finally, the Rosetta Archive is a print volume that collects the shortlisted works and other notable stories in translation, for those of you who prefer reading in print!
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