Global call for translators as Taiwan-Ireland poetry competition opens

Taipei, July 8 (CNA) The 2025 Taiwan-Ireland Poetry Translation Competition is now accepting entries, inviting translators worldwide to take on a poem by Taiwanese poet Dong Shu-ming (董恕明), organizers announced Tuesday.

This year's featured work is "Like a Song -- to 107-year-old Mumu on Her Journey"-- an elegy written in a combination of Chinese, Bopomofo, English, and the indigenous Puyuma language, said the National Museum of Taiwan Literature, which co-hosts the event with Trinity College Dublin's Centre for Literary and Cultural Translation.

The poem pays tribute to Dong's grandmother, a 107-year-old elder whose life embodies a century of Puyuma resilience, cultural memory, and multilingual heritage, the museum said.

"Through richly textured imagery, multilingual cadences, and intergenerational echoes, the poem traces mumu's life as a woman of the Pinaski (a Puyuma tribe) community, spanning languages from Puyuma to Japanese to Mandarin and beyond," Trinity said in a press release.

Now in its fifth year, the competition has previously featured poems in Chinese, Taiwanese and Hakka by poets including Tsao Yu-po (曹馭博), Cheng Shun-tsong (鄭順聰), Tseng Kuei-hai (曾貴海), and Temu Suyan (黃璽).

The initiative was launched in 2021 by Trinity College Dublin and the Taipei Representative Office in Ireland.

Winners will be invited to take part in an international online exchange in November 2025 to share insights on translation and creative writing. The deadline for submissions is Sept. 10, 2025.

For more information and to submit your entry, visit: https://forms.gle/taQbQeUQanBJxnsB7