Wisconsin Translators Panel
Translators are an indispensable link between authors and their foreign readers because they are the means by which texts from different cultures circulate. Without translators, Walt Disney would not have been able to introduce US children to Pinocchio (by Italian writer Carlo Collodi), The Little Mermaid (by Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen), or Cinderella (by Italian storyteller Giovan Battista Basile and later French writer Charles Perrault)... Consider The Bible, whose pages have been translated countless times into countless languages while others are still working on creating a “better” version of it?
Translators are not just people with a good knowledge of one or more foreign languages: they also know firsthand the culture in which those foreign languages flourish. For this reason, they can understand the subtleties of the foreign text and can transpose it into their native language. They are often authors, writers, and poets themselves who lend their writing skills to a foreign author, giving the opportunity to introduce a piece of work to an new audience.
Diane Grosklaus Whitty
Diane Grosklaus Whitty is an ATA (American Translators Association) certified translator and the owner of Nuanced Translations, LLC based in Verona, WI. She is very active in the Madison translator and interpreter community and served as Board Member of the Midwest Association of Translators and Interpreters (MATI) from 2011 to 2014.
From 1982 to 1986, she served as translator and interpreter for the Australian Consulate General in Rio de Janeiro, where in 1997 she taught Portuguese-to-English literary translation at the Pontifical Catholic University. Since 2010, she has served as English language consultant for História Ciências Saúde – Manguinhos, an interdisciplinary journal of the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation that explores history, the sciences, and health.
Among the books she has translated and published are: The Sanitation of Brazil by Gilberto Hochman, The Devil and the Land of the Holy Cross by Laura de Mello e Souza, and Activist Biology by Regina Horta Duarte. She is currently at work on a book of feature articles by Brazilian journalist Eliane Brum, which will be published by Graywolf in 2019.
Dong Isbister
Dong Isbister is an assistant professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at University of Wisconsin-Platteville. Her research and teaching interests include collective memory and immigration, transnational feminism, environmental humanities, U.S. multi-ethnic studies, women’s literature, and translation and interpreting studies. Some of her published scholarly and creative works include “(Re) connecting People and the Land: Ecomemory in Environmental Writings by Ethnic Minority Women Writers in China” (co-author), “Rainbow” (poem) and “Self as Diasporic Body: Hung Liu’s Self-Portrait Resident Alien.” She, Xiumei Pu (Westminster College in Utah) and Stephen Rachman (Michigan State University) have co-edited Ethnicity and Environment: New Voices from Chinese Minority Women Writers, an anthology that features recent works of new, emerging, or established women writers from minority groups in China. Isbister is also one of the translators for the anthology. The project has won one of the ASLE translation grants and the University of Wisconsin-Platteville SAIF grants (2016; 2018). It will be published by McFarland.
Daniel Youd
Daniel Youd is professor of Chinese language and literature in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Beloit College in Beloit, Wisconsin, where he has taught since 2002. His teaching and research interests include Ming and Qing dynasty vernacular fiction, translation studies, science fiction, and intellectual history. Previously, he has published research related to early modern translations of Chinese fiction into various European languages. He is currently working on a larger study that focuses on the theories of language, translation, and communication that emerged from interactions between Chinese and European cultures from the seventeenth to the early twentieth centuries.