Li, Nieda, Sanches and Seale named as Princeton University Translators in Residence

The Program in Translation and Intercultural Communication (PTIC) has named Dong Li, Takami Nieda, Julia Sanches and Yasmine Seale as Princeton University’s Translators in Residence. Each of the four translators will be joining the Princeton community for one semester over the course of academic years 2025-26 and 2026-2027.

“We are truly delighted to host four remarkable translators working in so many different languages over the next four semesters,” said David Bellos, Meredith Howland Pyne Professor of French Literature and acting director of PTIC. “Students will profit greatly from encounters with professional translators working outside the academy and will gain insights into the process of translation in real-world settings as well as advice and mentoring on many aspects of their own translations.”

The PTIC program resides within the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, which provides support for translation workshops, guest lectures, study abroad and new courses. The Translator in Residence position is also supported by the Council on the Humanities and the Lewis Center for the Arts.

More about the newly appointed translators in residence:

Dong Li is a multilingual author who translates from Chinese, English, French and German. His full-length English translations from Chinese include “The Gleaner Song” by Song Lin, “The Wild Great Wall” by Zhu Zhu, and “The Ruins” by Ye Hui. Li’s debut poetry collection, “The Orange Tree,” was the inaugural winner of the Phoenix Emerging Poet Book Prize and a finalist for Poetry Society of America’s Four Quartets Prize. Li is the recipient of fellowships and residencies from Akademie Schloss Solitude, American Literary Translators Association, Artist-in-Residence Munich, Headlands Center for the Arts, Literarisches Colloquium Berlin and Yaddo, among others. 

Takami Nieda is a translator from Japanese, whose work includes the YA novels “GO” by Kazuki Kaneshiro and “The Color of the Sky Is the Shape of the Heart” by Chesil. Other notable works include “Finger Bone” by Hiroki Takahashi, winner of the Lindsley and Masao Miyoshi Translation Prize, and the forthcoming “The Healing Hippo of Hinode Park” by Michiko Aoyama. She serves as the Japanese mentor for the American Literary Translators Association’s Emerging Translator Mentorship Program and is a member on the advisory board of the University of Washington’s Translation Studies Hub.

Julia Sanches has translated close to thirty works of literature from Catalan, Portuguese and Spanish into English, including International Booker finalists “Boulder” by Eva Baltasar, “Undiscovered” by Gabriela Wiener, and “Reservoir Bitches” by Dahlia de la Cerda (co-translated with Heather Cleary). 

Yasmine Seale is a poet, translator and critic. Among her translations from Arabic are “The Annotated Arabian Nights,” described by the New Yorker as “an electric new translation,” and “Something Evergreen Called Life,” a collection of poems by the Sudanese writer and activist Rania Mamoun. Other books include “Agitated Air,” a collaboration with Robin Moger responding to the visionary poet and metaphysician Ibn Arabi. A former fellow of the Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris and of the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, she is currently a visiting professor at Columbia University.