I cannot recommend Marianne Yeh highly enough as a literary translator and bilingual translation reviewer. Recently I was tasked with translating a very long work of fiction quite quickly. It seemed to the publisher and to me prudent to bring in a bilingual reviewer in case I had skipped any nuances or introduced any errors along the way, given the timeframe and overall editing process for the book. I thought immediately of Marianne, who I had met when she was completing her Master’s degree in translation and interpreting at NYU. While at NYU Marianne had produced numerous impressive translations from Chinese, including her thesis work in fiction supervised by Stacy Mosher. I had from the outset a general sense of Marianne as an exceptionally talented student and came away from this project just as impressed with her professional work.
In literary translation, bilingual reviews are not always the norm (perhaps they should be), but I have had several books reviewed in a broad strokes way to give the publisher an overall assessment of the accuracy and fluency. The experience with Marianne far exceeded this. She offered me an introductory meeting to share initial ideas and be sure we were “on the same page” about the level of the review and what type of semantic issues she would be looking for in her comparison of the Chinese novel and the translation. She was patient and understanding about the manuscript being delivered to her piecemeal as the installments were ready. Most importantly, her comments were perceptive and nuanced, offering advanced analysis of the text based on her close reading, cultural knowledge, and linguistic brilliance.
My favorite insight from Marianne was actually the first observation she made at the opening of the novel where the author, Can Xue, had used the phrase 冥冥之中. As Marianne so rightly noted, this “carries a sense of destiny, fate, or something beyond human understanding and happening in the mysterious darkness/void through an invisible hand.” I had condensed the sense, too compactly, as “obscure,” and was guided by her observation to include the valence of fatefulness as well.
There were many similarly perceptive comments, always with multiple suggestions for ways that the text might be revised. In the end, the project was much better for her interventions, and I could feel confident that a second expert had read the translation so closely and with such care. It was a joyful experience to work with Marianne!
