on translation (for open glossary)
(Note: This was originally written in June 2023. The artist James Nguyen had cold emailed me to invite me to contribute to Open Glossary, an exhibit he was putting together for the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art. James' principled enthusiasm and persistence somehow defeated my atrocious email latency and years-long writers' block, and he got me to submit this short reflection on translation in the context of the Letters for Black Lives project to accompany that exhibit. Thank you, James, for putting up with me!)
In 2016, I was struggling to talk to my parents about race in America. I realized that translation was the crux of the problem: between my childish Chinese and their practically acquired English, we simply had no shared vocabulary for these concepts. I decided to write a letter to my parents explaining my views on the Black Lives Matter movement in a way that was grounded in their values, then translate it into Chinese.
I fired off a tweet about this plan and started working in a public Google Doc, mostly hoping to attract a collaborator whose written Chinese was better than mine. A few hours later, hundreds of people—close friends and internet strangers alike—had joined in, contributing line edits and self-organizing into groups who would eventually translate the original English letter into dozens of languages.
I had been thinking a lot about translation back then, as I was writing about Chinese digital and place-based subcultures for an American audience at the time. Letters for Black Lives was shaped by two realizations in particular.
First, all complex conversations—even those in just one language—benefit from the lens of translation. No two people bring the exact same set of references and mental models to a conversation; conflict often springs from assuming they do. This is especially important to remember when trying to change or synchronize minds: teaching, facilitating, and organizing all improve with an awareness of just how different brains and lives can be, and treating that difference with respect and curiosity.
Second, the ability to translate is not symmetric. After 28 years of living in the US, I'm far better at translating from Chinese to English than vice versa—my Chinese is good enough to extract meaning, but not always to artfully package meaning into sense. Successful translation requires an ability to graft new information onto a foundation of shared understanding with the recipient. Without understanding how the person you're translating for makes sense of the world, the translation may not land.
Translation, then, works best when it embodies respect and care. A generous translator meets someone where they are and guides them to a new destination—not with the implied superiority of an instructor, but with the infectious enthusiasm of a friend sharing something beloved.
Watching hundreds of self-assembled strangers work together on Letters for Black Lives, I learned one more thing about translation: when done collectively, it lays the groundwork for healthy organizing. Translating as a group asks people to synthesize their abstract beliefs into something specific and precise. To deeply consider where rifts in experience necessitate forks in messaging. To come to consensus, because a paragraph can only tolerate so many parentheticals. To constantly anchor strategic decisions on what works best for the recipients, not what feels most satisfying to ourselves.
When we finished, the letters—in endless forms most beautiful, often personalized further by the senders—went out to an unknown number of recipients. They nudged open doors to deeper conversations and allowed people to pleasantly surprise each other. They also built a community robust enough to come back together in 2020 for a second round entirely without my interference—a growing swell of acolytes to the sacred craft of translation.
(A second note, sorry: in writing this, I tried to stick to the core principle of LFBL—keeping the message as accessible as possible for the intended audience, which in this case is a bunch of museum visitors in a continent I've never set foot on before. As I reread it to post here, I am practically sitting on my hands to not edit it and inject more nuance. But getting back into writing in public is as much about practicing letting go as it is about putting words down! That said, I could not help changing/adding five (5) words. The soft animal of my body is a pedantic little shit.)