New Books in Language and Translation

In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Dr Agnes Bodis talks to Hannah Madin and Catherine White. Hannah is a Teaching and Learning Officer at the Department of Education in the Northern Territory (Australia), and Catherine White is a Teaching and Learning Coach in secondary education.

We are zooming in on learning English as an additional language or dialect in remote communities in Australia’s Northern Territory (NT). There are numerous Aboriginal languages spoken there as well as dialects of English. However, the language of schooling remains Standard Australian English.

We discuss this mismatch between first or home languages, language of education, and teacher preparedness. Hannah and Catherine outline a collaborative project by the NT Department of Education to remove these barriers to learning in the school context. The project is called “Roadmap to Stage 1 Essential English and Mathematics” and includes not only the creation of teaching support materials, but the creation of an online Community of Practice, a professional learning program and school visits.

For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here.
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It is a curious fact that among the first Yiddish books ever printed was a translation of the New Testament, which appeared in 1540, only 18 years after Luther's famous translation (which it shamelessly cribbed). In the centuries that followed, another dozen or so missionary translations directed to Yiddish-speaking Jews followed. This talk will explore a dramatic change in the character of these translations in the twentieth century, when new conceptions of the Yiddish language, new cosmopolitanism in Yiddish culture, and new understandings of Jewish-Christian conversion converged to create new translation styles that aimed to express Jesus's Jewishness through a rich and haymish Yiddish.

Join YIVO for a very Jewish Christmas celebration featuring a talk on Yiddish translations of the New Testament by Naomi Seidman.

This lecture originally took place on December 21, 2023.
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Are we currently experiencing a Yiddish renaissance? This is one of the questions we are often asked at YIVO. YIVO’s own community of Yiddish learners has expanded more than 10-fold in the last two years. Duolingo has added Yiddish as a language. Headline after headline touts Yiddish as unexpectedly alive and well. What does this all mean for Yiddish in the 21st century?

Join YIVO for a conversation about the Yiddish world today. Led by YIVO’s Director of Public Programs Alex Weiser, this program will feature journalist and playwright Rokhl Kafrissen, scholar and In Geveb Editor-in-chief Jessica Kirzane, scholar and Yiddish podcast founder and host Sandra Fox, and YIVO’s Director of Education Ben Kaplan.

This panel discussion originally took place on June 1, 2022.
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In this episode of the New Books Network, we talk with Jeremy Tiang about his English translation of The Formosa Exchange (Honford Star, 2026)—which will be released on September 18, 2026 (but is available for preorder).Tiang is a novelist, playwright, and translator based in New York. He has translated more than thirty books from Chinese to English—including Zou Jingzhi's Ninth Building, longlisted for the 2023 International Booker Prize—and has served as a judge for the National Book Award for translated literature. Beyond translation, his novel State of Emergency won the Singapore Literature Prize in 2018, and his play Salesman之死 won a Obie Award for Outstanding New Play in 2023.

Originally published in Mandarin in 2021 as 新寶島 and winner of that year's Taiwan Literature Award, The Formosa Exchange is a work of speculative fiction by Taiwanese novelist Huang Chongkai (黃崇凱). The novel kicks off with a fantastical occurrence: one night, the entire populations of Taiwan and Cuba swap places, with Taiwanese people ending up on the island of Cuba and Cuban people on the island of Taiwan. This “Great Exchange” becomes a lens for examining national identity, indigeneity, and colonialism, especially with reference to Taiwan’s and Cuba's shared position in the shadow of their much larger neighbors of China and the United States.

Scholars and learners across history, political science, anthropology, literature, and beyond will find much food for thought in The Formosa Exchange. The novel is dense with allusions—it nods to Western thinkers like John Mearsheimer and Claude Lévi-Strauss, while also weaving in references to Taiwanese and Cuban literature, art, and film.

Anthony Kao is a writer who intersects international affairs and cultural criticism. He founded/edits Cinema Escapist—a publication exploring the sociopolitical context behind global film and television—and also writes for outlets like The Guardian, Al Jazeera, The Diplomat, and Eater.
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The Death of the Author and Anticolonial Thought (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025) promises
to transform a decades old debate in literary studies about the
relation between structure and agency, form and intention by giving a
detailed account—previously unstudied—of the way colonized writers have
responded to, learned from, and critiqued the death of the author
postulate declared by Roland Barthes in 1967. The book is a cultural
history of these debates—with a particular focus on two crucial two key
case studies, Martinican poet and thinker Édouard Glissant and
Palestinian literary and cultural critic Edward Said, this book, then,
examines the immediate emergence and intensification of such responses
to the postulate of the author’s deathly absence from the text, in order
to suggest that metropolitan literary theory drew both critique and
engagement from scholars of black, decolonial and Global South
background from both before 1967 and Barthes’s declaration and in its
wake. This book provides a focused account of the early history of the
way global literatures have engaged with, critiqued, and occasionally
adopted the lessons and limitations of the poststructuralist critique of
that most fetishized and also reviled of figures: the author.

Matthis
Frickhoeffer is a scholar of critical theory and French thought with a
background in literature studies, linguistics and art theory. His work
focuses on questions of form, semiotics, and intertextuality. He teaches
at the University of Texas at Dallas.
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