Education / Sandness lass wins Chinese translation prize
A YOUNG local woman who started her schooling career at primary in Sandness has just scooped a national prize for her work translating Chinese into English.
Flossie Taylor, who now lives and works in Edinburgh, came first at a recent competition held by Bristol Translates! Summer School in conjunction with Comma Press.
A graduate from Bristol University, the 26-year-old will now be invited to translate a full story for the publisher’s forthcoming The Book of Beijing.
Having grown up in Shetland, she only started learning Chinese at university in 2013, and graduated with a master’s degree in Chinese to English translation seven years later.
Due to the Covid pandemic, she came home to stay with her mother in Sandness in 2020 to continue and remotely finish her studies – not an easy task given the Westside’s very basic broadband provision.
“I didn’t have a specific reason for choosing Chinese,” she said. “I had always been interested in Chinese history and culture, but these subjects weren’t covered at school, and there weren’t many opportunities to learn about them, so I gradually forgot about the idea.
“I enjoyed studying Latin and English but didn’t want to carry on with my sixth form subjects at university, so I looked at a list of degrees and chose Chinese as it would be something entirely new for me and because it involved the language-learning element that I enjoyed so much in Latin.”
She said she had been following the literary translation scene for some time but had not found the courage to take the first step and submit her work.
When the Bristol summer school was looking for entries for a competition for Chinese to English translations, she felt it was the “perfect opportunity for a first attempt”.
She said she will continue to keep working in the commercial translation sector but hopes that winning this prize would give her a chance to turn her literary translation hobby into a career.
“I hope that winning this competition and getting my work published for the first time will help me in the process of trying to become a literary translator,” she said.
“Ideally, I would love to get a few more short stories or extracts published in magazines or anthologies and eventually get a contract for a whole novel.
“This still seems very, very far away, and I think I have a lot of work to do to improve my writing skills, but having a translation of mine be recognised like this is very encouraging and has given me more motivation to keep trying.”
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