The translator's voice embodied: Translating the "New Northeast Chinese Writers Group" from text to audio

Anxieties about the fidelity of translation to the work in its original language are still widespread in China
and beyond, evinced by the unabating "translation wars" (Remnick 2005) on book review platforms. In
recent years, the rise of audiobooks across the globe has, in a similar vein, brought about "narrator
wars" (Knox 2011:137), where alternative recordings of canonical works trigger listeners' debates over
which narrator captures "the authorial voice" most precisely. Yet there is an alarming difference between
the status of the audiobook narrator and the translator: "the narrator voicing a commercial audiobook is
a palpable presence" (ibid:133), while the literary translator is "a self-effacing and distant presence"
(ibid).
My project will address the following questions: (1) what do audiobook narrators tell us about "voice" in
translated narratives? Do we need to base a translation's success on the distance between the so-called
"translator's voice" and the "authorial voice" if mimetic reading (performed not only by audiobook
narrators but occasionally and intermittently, by translators and general readers) inevitably leads to
clashing voices-that is, when the written "voice" is confronted with the reading voice? And (2) what
about the "voice" in literature that is no longer merely a textual presence but an embodiment and a
"giving voice to" that is no longer a metaphor but an audial reality? -how might literary translators
occupy the role of narrator, giving voice to themselves and making themselves heard by many?
To answer these questions, I propose to weave my voice as a literary translator through a two-stage
translation project, using literary examples from the writings of the "New Northeast Chinese Writers'
Group" (Huang 2020) that includes Shuang Xuetao, Zheng Zhi, and Ban Yu. Thematically and formally
shaped by the post-industrial soundscapes of northeast China since the country's market transition,
these novels address the lost futures of the region's laid-off industrial workers, whose voices remained
unheeded until the recent renaissance of rust-belt fiction and audio storytelling in China. I will translate
at least 1 story from each of the 3 writers from Chinese to English before embodying my translating
"voice" by voice-narrating the resultant translations. At the textual translation stage (Stage One: year 1),
I will work on the linguistic, literary, and cultural dimensions of these writings by adding footnotes to
illustrate how the sounds and voices registered in these stories capture, import, or converge with the
extra-textual soundscapes they are embedded in. When turning the translated texts into audiobooks
(Stage Two: year 2-3), I will employ Monika Fludernik's reformulations of reader-oriented narratology
(1996) and recent scholarship on audio-narratology (Kuzmicová 2016) to offer a hermeneutics of the
literary translator's "self-envoicement". In this way, I aim to produce "literary" translations that not only
reflect changes in the way translated literature is received and consumed but also improve the
palpability of the literary translator's presence. By re-mediating one's own translation into an audiobook
through "self-envoicement", the literary translator will finally gain a voice that is audible and intimate to
her readers, and genuinely true to herself.