'Taiwan Travelogue' translator, editor awarded prize by ALTA

New York, Nov. 7 (CNA) Lin King (金翎), the English translator of "Taiwan Travelogue" (臺灣漫遊錄) by Taiwanese author Yang Shuang-zi (楊双子), and the novel's editor, Yuka Igarashi, have won a translation prize from the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA).

The association announced the 2025 ALTA First Translation Prize winners at an awards ceremony as part of its annual conference held in Tucson city, Arizona on Thursday.

It is the latest translation prize won by King's translation of "Taiwan Travelogue" in the United States. She also received awards from the U.S. National Book Award for Translated Literature and Asia Society's Baifang Schell Book Prize last year.

In a statement, ALTA described "Taiwan Travelogue," published by Minneapolis-headquartered Graywolf Press, as a "complex, multivocal meditation on language, power, and queer desire" with Yang crafting "a fictional translation within a translation: a memoir by a Japanese writer in 1930s colonial Taiwan, filtered through Mandarin Chinese which we in turn receive in English in Lin King's translation."

King is fluent in Mandarin, Japanese and English.

As the translator, "King navigates the novel's shifting linguistic and historical registers with precision and flair, preserving its layered complexity while bringing its sensuous prose and intellectual play into English," ALTA said. "This is a rare and remarkable act of translation, one that reflects upon itself as a translation."

In June, when King received the Award for Outstanding Translated Literature from Chinese Language at the Baifang Schell Book Prize, she said she planned to continue writing and hoped to publish her debut English-language work next year.

Igarashi is an executive editor at Graywolf Press, according to the association.

The ALTA First Translation Prize recognizes the work of emerging literary translators and their editors and is open to all genres. It awards one debut literary translation from any other language into English published in the previous calendar year.

The judges of the 2025 translation awards are C.J. Evans, David M. Smith and Jiyoon Lee.