Left to right: Jhumpa Lahiri, Octavio Paz, Rabindranath Tagore

‘Bad English’ in self-translation isn’t always a bad thing, says Ursula Deser Friedman. It can be an act of revolution

In 1913, Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) became the first Asian Nobel Laureate for his poetry collection Gitanjali: Song offerings, which he had translated from Bengali into English himself. However, Tagore assessed his self-translation as having done a “gross injustice” to his source text. He performed Gitanjali for an elite global audience by rendering the poetry in an ornate Shakespearean style far removed from the concise Bengali version. As a result, he reluctantly gained a place in world literature before he became well-known within the Bengali literary tradition.¹

By contrast, Ha Jin (哈金; pen name for Xuefei Jin 金雪飛, b. 1956) intentionally catapulted himself into the world literary polysystem by publishing first in his non-native English. Despite scooping up the PEN/Faulkner Award, Jin raised eyebrows by writing novels in a hybrid ‘translationese’ style that he translates back into his native Chinese. Where Tagore hoped to further his Pan-Asia political movement by promoting himself on the world stage, Jin has sought to channel nostalgia for mainland China to gather a Chinese readership and, by translating back into Chinese, to use self-translation for personal catharsis.

Self-translation as rewriting

Self-translation is a self-reflexive process through which authors translate their own writing into other languages either simultaneously or consecutively. Many self-translators refer to this process as one of transaction² or rewriting³, rather than translation per se. My research centres around émigré Sinophone authors’ self-translation practices. As these authors translate their own works between Chinese and English both languages are revitalised. In adapting dialogue, idioms and humour from Chinese into English and vice versa, they add local flavour and idiosyncrasies to their writing.

Jhumpa Lahiri, who has translated her own writing from Italian into English, describes self-translation as a reversal of the assumed direction from source to translated text: “Like an image viewed in the mirror, [the source text] has turned into the simulacrum, and both is and is not the starting point for what rationally and irrationally followed.”⁴

According to Hokenson and Munson, the self-translated text simultaneously exists in two languages and in two separate versions, often featuring overlapping content.⁵ Because the writer-translator has access to their own authorial intentions, they are empowered to take creative liberties that a conventional ‘outside’ translator might shy away from.

Defamiliarising trauma

Authors may translate their own work for pragmatic reasons, such as to forgo a translator’s fee, to reclaim their own cultural capital or to control the reception of their work; for creative reasons, such as the impulse to revisit and improve the original; and for psychological reasons, such as a desire to restore wholeness to their split selves, and/or as a means of distancing themselves from memories of war and exile.

The Russian formalist Victor Shklovsky argued that writing in a foreign language defamiliarises trauma.⁶ By gaining distance from our own language, we gain distance from personal and inherited traumas. The resulting self-awareness allows us to view our trauma from a distance, to break the immobilising cycle of traumatic recollection, retrieval and re-experience through reader-enabled catharsis.

Self-translation defamiliarises the source text when both the self-translator and the reader allow the text to surprise and challenge them. In this way, it juxtaposes linguistic and cultural systems in a way that can catalyse linguistic innovation and evolution. By defamiliarising their own narratives through the smokescreen of a different language, self-translators cultivate renewed cultural and aesthetic awareness, which often leads to artistic breakthroughs. Performing their text(s) in another language(s) establishes a critical distance or detachment that can deliver fresh insight into the work at hand.

I maintain that every creation is, in essence, a recreation; moreover, every act of self-expression is one of self-translation – we are constantly sublimating our non-verbal thoughts and feelings into oral and written linguistic structures, and re-inscribing the world back into our own psyche. As the Nobel Prize-winning Mexican writer Octavio Paz put it, “when we learn to speak, we are learning to translate.”⁷ In this sense, language is itself a form of translation: translatimus, ergo sumus (‘we translate, therefore we are’).

‘Weirding’ colonial languages

The outside translator may be able to translate more ethically than the self-translator. The latter’s privileged access to the process of composing the source text may actually skew  their fidelity towards the source culture and cause them to neglect the target reader's cultural sensibilities. However, if the self-translator inserts a buffer – time, geographical and/or psychological distance – between themselves and the source text, they may be able to achieve a more democratic balance between the cultural context of both source and translated cultures.

Self-translators aren’t necessarily professional translators. They often write in English but are not completely proficient, so their translations often fall into the category of ‘bad’ English (e.g. non-standard). In my research, I’ve found that ‘bad’ English enables writers to ‘democratise’ the English language by opening it up to a multiplicity of voices and perspectives.

Doris Sommer builds on the idea of defamiliarisation, arguing that the jarring nature of the unpleasant gives people reflexive pause, shocking the beholder into pleasure. By forcing reflection, hybrid languages and multilingualism help cultivate a taste for the sublime and the unfamiliar, mirroring the ‘double consciousness’ of the migrant condition.⁸

Mired in colonial discourse, the languages of European empires hamper linguistic diversity. Therefore, self-translation, particularly self-translation between more ‘peripheral’ languages into colonial ones, presents a unique opportunity for diversifying these colonial languages. Evelyn Ch’ien refers to the ‘weirding’ of English through exchanges with local languages, and notes how this remakes them as engines for social justice.⁹ Such exchanges are driven by self-translators’ ability to amalgamate English, in particular, with languages such as Chinese, Bengali, Arabic, Hindi, Quechua, Swahili and Basque.

According to Ch’ien, “Weird-English writers de-normalize English out of resistance to it, and form their own language by combining English with their original language.” In this way, they remake the English language through a multilingual dialogue that embraces jargon and non-standard language usage. This process also occurs with French, Portuguese and other colonial languages. 

Such writers resist the monolith of ‘pure’ English and debunk the notion that speaking a language from birth entails a superior command over the language. Building on this concept, my work focuses on émigré Sinophone authors’ subversive potential to ‘weird’, ‘hybridize’ and ‘badden’ English, thus rendering it more inclusive to non-native speakers and ensuring its continued evolution.

By weirding English, and thus inviting linguistic diversity and inclusivity, writers usher in community-building and experimentation across racial, class and linguistic divides. By ‘taking back’ English through creative interpolations, self-translators who embrace non-standard English reveal the language as a tool for democratic linguistic revolution. Self-translation, particularly the process of translating from a non-colonial language into English, thus provides a medium for catalysing linguistic evolution.

Self-translation invites linguistic experimentation by offering authors a platform through which to experiment with syntax, narrative structure, dialogue and stylistic devices. In this sense, self-translators write against the grain and enable the English language to evolve beyond standard usage

Notes

1 Zafor, A (2013) 'Tagore's Poetry in English Translation: A critical review'. In Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bangladesh, 58,1, 67

2 Federman, R (trans. Federman and Privat-Standley, P) (2001) Aunt Rachel’s Fur, Normal and Tallahassee, 13

3 Lahiri, J (2022) Translating Myself and Others, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 17

4 Ibid. 85

5 Hokenson, J and Munson, M (2007) The Bilingual Text: History and theory of literary self-translation, Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing, 4

6 Shklovsky, V (trans. Lemon, LT and Reis, MJ) (1965) 'Art as Technique', In Russian Formalist Criticism: Four essays, 2nd ed, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 3-24

7 Paz, O (trans. Del Corral, I) (1992) 'Translation: Literature and letters'. In Theories of Translation: An anthology of essays from Dryden to Derrida, Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 152

8 Sommer, D (2004) Bilingual Aesthetics: A news sentimental education, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 134

9 Ch'ien, EN-M (2004) Weird English, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 6

Ursula Deser Friedman is a creative writer and scholar of modern Chinese literature and Translation Studies at Harvard Univeristy. She adopts a reparative approach to literary translation, whereby author, translator and reader jointly engage in collective world-making.

Ursula's Self-Translation as Method: Modern Sinophone self-translators and their transmediated afterlives is out now.

This article has been reproduced from the Summer 2026 issue of The Linguist. Download the full edition here.