The translator's voice embodied: Translating the "New Northeast Chinese Writers Group" from text to audio

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Anxieties about the fidelity of translation to the work in its original language are still widespread in Chinaand beyond, evinced by the unabating "translation wars" (Remnick 2005) on book review platforms. Inrecent years, the rise of audiobooks across the globe has, in a similar vein, brought about "narratorwars" (Knox 2011:137), where alternative recordings of canonical works trigger listeners' debates overwhich narrator captures "the authorial voice" most precisely. Yet there is an alarming difference betweenthe status of the audiobook narrator and the translator: "the narrator voicing a commercial audiobook isa palpable presence" (ibid:133), while the literary translator is "a self-effacing and distant presence"(ibid).My project will address the following questions: (1) what do audiobook narrators tell us about "voice" intranslated narratives? Do we need to base a translation's success on the distance between the so-called"translator's voice" and the "authorial voice" if mimetic reading (performed not only by audiobooknarrators but occasionally and intermittently, by translators and general readers) inevitably leads toclashing voices-that is, when the written "voice" is confronted with the reading voice? And (2) whatabout the "voice" in literature that is no longer merely a textual presence but an embodiment and a"giving voice to" that is no longer a metaphor but an audial reality? -how might literary translatorsoccupy the role of narrator, giving voice to themselves and making themselves heard by many?To answer these questions, I propose to weave my voice as a literary translator through a two-stagetranslation project, using literary examples from the writings of the "New Northeast Chinese Writers'Group" (Huang 2020) that includes Shuang Xuetao, Zheng Zhi, and Ban Yu. Thematically and formallyshaped by the post-industrial soundscapes of northeast China since the country's market transition,these novels address the lost futures of the region's laid-off industrial workers, whose voices remainedunheeded until the recent renaissance of rust-belt fiction and audio storytelling in China. I will translateat least 1 story from each of the 3 writers from Chinese to English before embodying my translating"voice" by voice-narrating the resultant translations. At the textual translation stage (Stage One: year 1),I will work on the linguistic, literary, and cultural dimensions of these writings by adding footnotes toillustrate how the sounds and voices registered in these stories capture, import, or converge with theextra-textual soundscapes they are embedded in. When turning the translated texts into audiobooks(Stage Two: year 2-3), I will employ Monika Fludernik's reformulations of reader-oriented narratology(1996) and recent scholarship on audio-narratology (Kuzmicová 2016) to offer a hermeneutics of theliterary translator's "self-envoicement". In this way, I aim to produce "literary" translations that not onlyreflect changes in the way translated literature is received and consumed but also improve thepalpability of the literary translator's presence. By re-mediating one's own translation into an audiobookthrough "self-envoicement", the literary translator will finally gain a voice that is audible and intimate toher readers, and genuinely true to herself.