Living ‘in-between’: Five questions for Translator-in-Residence Julia Sanches

To date, Sanches has translated 30 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. PIIRS spoke with Sanches about the limits of machine translation, her approach to mentoring students, and her upcoming April 7 lecture, “When Literature Takes a Strange Turn…,” which explores the challenges of translating formally and stylistically unconventional texts. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

What draws you to a particular work or author when deciding what to translate?

I’m at the privileged part of my career where people seek me out. At the same time, I'm always looking for the project that's been overlooked, that needs an advocate. I tend to gravitate toward texts or writers who are writing from the margins of the canon or the central hub of publishing or the dominant space: women writers, queer writers, writers of color, working class writers. These are the writers whose stories I'm most interested in engaging with.

What do you find most challenging and most rewarding about translation?

Every single book is its own world of challenges, even when it’s by an author I’ve been translated before. There’s the challenge of striking a balance between a text that can sing in English and retaining as much as the original culture as possible, deciding what should remain opaque and what should be glossed for the reader so that they're not completely at sea. Humor, wordplay and puns are, obviously, extremely difficult. Unlocking the voice of each text takes a lot of finessing. That said, the biggest challenge is supporting yourself as a literary translator in a country that is becoming more and more expensive and less and less interested in supporting the arts. 

But all these things — except for money — are a joy, too. As is being in community with other translators. We're pretty cool people, if I may say so myself. We have the same nerdy interests.

What do you see as the limitations of AI when it comes to literary translation?

I don't think a machine can do something that requires such close reading and interpretation. The act of translation requires constant reading and rereading and engaging with content outside of the text. And then there are the beautiful coincidences in life that make [a translator] choose a particular term or turn of phrase. It’s possible that literary translation will end up as a boutique kind of translation, or that literature does end up translated by machines and readers become used to mediocre work. What I do think will happen is that our labor will be increasingly devalued because the people in charge don't understand how translation works. They'll just want faster results with no real sense of the time and artistry involved. 

What kinds of books will you be introducing in “When Literature Takes a Strange Turn…”?

I'll be touching on a weird little novel called “Pandora” by Ana Paula Pacheco. It follows a university professor named Ana who is stuck at home during the pandemic and begins to lose grip of reality. Not only does she lose grip of reality, but reality as we know it is fractures. The novel is structured around three main relationships: with a pangolin she bought at a market, with a queer activist who wants to create a cam-site to help sex workers make money during the pandemic, and with a very large bat. Her story is also told by other animals, projections of who she is. For example, an eagle who has just turned 41 and has decided to regenerate herself (or rejuvenate herself) on her own, a critique of the beauty mandate. I'll also talk about is a sci-fi novel, a first for me, by Munir Hachemi, about a long-forgotten space settlement. Finally, there’s “The Loneliest Tree in the World” by Mariana Salomão Carrara, a novel about a family of small tobacco farmers narrated by four non-human entities. 

How has your tenure at Princeton enriched you and your work?

The access to the library is phenomenal. I'm not used to being able to waltz over to a place like Firestone and simply pluck out a text I need for a particular translation project. It feels like being swaddled in the finest silk. The translation talks have been fascinating, too, as they make clear just how many directions the term “translation” can take you. I've been working closely with a student whose thesis is a translation of a novel from Portuguese. We meet every week and she asks me questions and I share resources. It’s like a book club, except that we’re reading a single paragraph very closely. What is the author trying to tell the reader or withhold from the reader? What is the weight of this word versus that word? How do you build a voice for a character? I love having those conversations. 

Join the Program in Translation and Intercultural Communication for “When Literature Takes a Strange Turn...” on April 7, 2026 at 12 p.m. in Louis A. Simpson International Building, Room 144. More details.