Darryl Sterk 石岱崙

I began translating short stories by Taiwanese authors for The Taipei Chinese PEN; my first book was Wu Ming-Yi’s The Man with the Compound Eyes (2013), and my second, The Stolen Bicycle, was longlisted for the 2018 Man Booker International Prize. Since then I've translated the colonial writer Loā Hô, the contemporary writers Lai Chih-ying and Kevin Chen, and the Indigenous writers Sakinu Ahronglong and Syaman Rapongan.

My research started with the representation of Indigenous people in Taiwanese film and fiction, turned to the translation of the Indigenous language Seediq, and then to ecotranslation in the Anthropocene. Lately I've been working on Indigenous language AI: machine translation and speech technology for Seediq in the AI-pocene. My plan is to shoot two suns with one arrow, to adapt an idiom, by translating works of literature into Seediq and other native languages, to give people more things to read and to expand the training corpus. My web apps include Gluban Translate, Seediq Reader, Formosan Reader, Taiwanese Reader, and Grandma’s Mandarin.

I live on Lamma Island, Hong Kong, with my wife and daughter.

Translator

I Still Love Black Eyes — Qi-Deng Sheng. Lynx, 2026.
Eyes of the Ocean — Syaman Rapongan, 2025.
Ghost Town — Kevin Chen. Europa Editions, 2022. Longlisted, PEN America Translation Prize 2023.
The Mermaid’s Tale — Lee Wei-Jing. Simon & Schuster, 2022.
Hunter School — Sakinu Ahronglong. Honford Star, 2020.
Home Sickness — Chih-ying Lay. Linda Leith, 2020.
Wedding in Autumn and Other Stories — Shih Chiung-yu. Balestier, 2018.
Scales of Injustice: The Complete Fiction of Loā Hô — Honford Star, 2018.
The Stolen Bicycle — Wu Ming-Yi. Text, 2017. Longlisted, Man Booker International Prize 2018.
Dr. Bethune’s Children — Xue Yiwei. Linda Leith, 2017.
Shenzheners — Xue Yiwei. Linda Leith, 2016.
The Tree Fort on Carnation Lane — Horace Ho. Balestier, 2016.
The Bear Whispers to Me — Chang Ying-tai. Balestier, 2015.
The Man with the Compound Eyes — Wu Ming-Yi. Harvill Secker, 2013.

Short fiction & essays in translation

Many of these are also posted on my translation blog, Big Wheel.

2026 LU Ping, excerpt from Sugar Bun Island.
2026 Cheung Yuen-man, “The Meow-Ya Civilization,” “Lives of the Rats,” “A Leaf Falls.”
2026 Cheung Ka-Yu, “It’ll Be Okay”; Chiao Tung, “Lover’s Tears”; Yang Chia-Hsien, “Clear Water Bay and Chek Lap Kok” — The Taipei Chinese PEN.
2025 Sakinu, “Flying Squirrel College,” Taiwanese Ecotranslation Reader.
2025 Husluman Vava, “The Warrior Who Missed”; Wang Hao-wei, “Seaboard Mountain Range” — The Taipei Chinese PEN.
2024 Syaman Rapongan, “Ngalomirem’s Horizons”; Paelabang Danapan, “In the Presence of the Great Anthropologist”; Lin Hsin-hui, “Contactless Intimacy” — The Taipei Chinese PEN.
2023 Lin Yao-de, The Takasago Lilies of 1947, ch. 1, The Taipei Chinese PEN.
2022 Sun Ta-chuan, “Savage Writing — My Life of Scribbling”; Syaman Rapongan, “In Search of ‘Lost’ Time” (from Mata nu Wawa, serialized in three parts) — The Taipei Chinese PEN.
2021 Brendan Yu, sample from Worldviews: The Origins & Odysseys of Taiwan’s Montane Plants, Books from Taiwan.
2021 Lee Wei-Jing, “Diana” and “Persia,” The Taipei Chinese PEN.
2020 Sun Tzu-Ping, “Traffic Signs,” LCB Diplomatique; Wu Ming-Yi, “Deep Night, Cat Lane,” Flaneur 8.
2019 Wu Ming-Yi, “Black Night, Black Earth, Black Range,” Books from Taiwan.
2018 Liu Ka-shiang, “The Windbird Pinocha” PDF; Wu Ming-Yi, “Koxinga” PDF and “The Compass of the Soul” PDF — Taiwan Literature: English Translation Series 41.
2016 Xue Shu, “The Wandering Songstress” PDF; Cai Dong, “Song of Coarse Clothes” PDF — Pathlight; Wang Wenxing, “Clipped Wings, a History,” TLETS 39. PDF
2015 Hu Xuewen, “The Bicycle” PDF; Hao Yu-hsiang, “In the Tenement on Duckweed Lane” PDF; Wei-Yun Lin-Górecka, three stories in Absinthe Skeletor Miss Kiwi Solaris; Wu Ming-Yi, “Death is a Tiger Butterfly” PDF; excerpts from Horace Ho PDF, Egoyan Zheng PDF, and Chang Chia-Hua for Books from Taiwan; Liu Da-jen, “New Year’s Eve” PDF.
2014 Excerpts from Wolf Hsu PDF and Kao Yi-feng PDF for Books from Taiwan; Chang Yao-jen, “Grandpa’s Other Wife” PDF.
2012 Tung Wei-ko, “Cat Rescue Exercise” PDF; Alai, “The Hydroelectric Station” PDF and “The Threshing Machine” PDF; Belinda Chang, “Betrayal” PDF.
2011 Liu Da-jen, “The Green and Red Gang” PDF and “Revisiting the Past” PDF; Wang Da-zhi, “When Goodhouse Liu Met Prosper Wang” PDF; Zhang Yao-jen, “Cats, et Cetera” PDF — The Taipei Chinese PEN.
2010 Zhou Zhi-wen, “Wei-Huang Zao,” PDF The Taipei Chinese PEN.
2009 Yan Na, “A Time When One Needn’t Face Betrayal Heavy-Heartedly,” PDF The Taipei Chinese PEN.
2008 Ah Sheng, “My Classmates,” PDF The Taipei Chinese PEN.
2007 Ah Sheng, “Butterfly Psychic” PDF; Lung Ying-tai, “Best of Both Worlds: Starbucks and Wisteria Teahouse” PDF — The Taipei Chinese PEN.

Subtitles & other translations

2022 Gaga, dir. Laha Mebow — subtitles.
2022 Tale Feathers (野性物羽), Public Television Service — subtitles.
2012 Boundary Revelation, dir. Lee Li-shao — subtitles.
2022 Hsiau A-chin, Politics and Cultural Nativism in 1970s Taiwan: Youth, Narrative, Nationalism, Cambridge University Press.
2022 Seed Design, The Moss Twins (Forestry Bureau) and Forty Meters Underwater (Pingdong County Government).
2020 Miya/Seed Design, Lokot: The Fish That Lived in a Tree — A Tale from the Pangcah Tribe, Forestry Bureau.
2014 Three translations in The Columbia Sourcebook of Literary Taiwan, Columbia University Press.
2012 Antonio Chen, “On Taiwanese Novelists in 2011,” Asymptote.
2004 The Road to Freedom: Taiwan’s Postwar Human Rights Movement, Chen Wen-cheng Memorial Foundation.

Scholar

Cover of Indigenous Cultural Translation

Monograph

Indigenous Cultural Translation: A Thick Description of Seediq Bale (Routledge, 2020) — on the translation of the (back)screenplay of Seediq Bale into Seediq, and, in general, the effect of translation on the grandmother tongues of Taiwan. Postprint

Reviewed by Scott Simon in International Journal of Taiwan Studies and Arthur Holmer in Journal of Translation Studies.

Articles, chapters & reviews

Postprints are the PDFs as published, but with further corrections.

2026 “‘Seek first existence, then excellence’: Minority-language development through translation on the Seediq Wikipidiya,” Understanding Wikipedia’s Dark Matter, forthcoming.
2026 “Digital Urban Ecotranslation as Environmental Education in Anthropocene-Era Hong Kong: A User’s Perspective,” JoSTrans 46. Postprint
2026 “Laha Mebow,” The Routledge Encyclopedia of Sinophone Culture, forthcoming.
2026 “Lai He,” Brill Guide to Chinese Literature, 1900–2000, forthcoming.
2026 Review of Suzanne Jill Levine, Unfaithful: A Translator’s Memoir, TTR.
2025 〈臺灣原住民生態寫實小說中的獵人之禮〉，《臺灣原住民族知識論及其外》，台大出版中心。 Postprint
2025 “Translating Wu Ming-Yi into English and French” and “Wu Ming-Yi as an (Environmental) Educator,” The Wu Ming-Yi Companion, Cambria.
2025 “Towards Specialised Translator Studies in a Minority-Language Context: The Lives and Times of Uya Pawan, Hero of Language Development,” TTR 38.1. Postprint
2025 “Thicker Backtranslation in Austronesia: Towards a More Environmentally Sustainable Sovereignty,” Translation Studies. Postprint
2025 “After the Fairy Tale Ends: Towards an Ecological Account of the Translation of Traditional Ecological Knowledge,” The Translator 31.3. Postprint
2025 “Everything Everywhere All At Once: The Translational Harmony in Mother’s Tongue by the Formosan Indigenous Pop Diva Abao as a Metaphor for Democracy and Indigeneity in a Settler Society,” Translation Matters 7.1. Postprint
2025 Review of Scott E. Simon, Truly Human, Indigenous Religious Traditions 2.2. Postprint
2025 “Sediq” and “Headhunting,” Taiwan Encyclopedia, Brill. Sediq Headhunting
2025 “Transforming Students into Citizens of Planet Earth Through Ecotranslation,” Translation Practices as Agents of Transformation in Multilingual Settings, Springer. Postprint
2025 “The role of the insider translator in conservation and development: comparing multilingual (auto)ethnobotanical books from Tanzania, Thailand, and Taiwan,” Multilingua 44.2. Postprint
2024 “A Double-Edged Sword: Indigenous Translation Under Colonisation in Taiwan,” Routledge Handbook of East Asian Translation. Postprint
2024 “The Dutch Impact on Siraya Ethnic Plants in Historical Perspective,” Since 1624. Postprint
2022 “Responsible Primitivism: Wu Ming-yi’s The Man with the Compound Eyes as Indigenous-Themed Environmental World Literature,” Taiwanese Literature as World Literature, Bloomsbury. Postprint
2022 “Quest for Roots: Trauma and Heroism in Wu He’s Yusheng and Tang Shiang-Chu’s Yusheng: Seediq Bale,” The Musha Incident, Columbia University Press. Postprint
2022 “Inclusive Development, Translation and Indigenous-Language Pop: Yoku Walis’s Seejiq Hip Hop,” Linguistica Antverpiensia 21. Postprint
2022 “Pedagogical Devices: On the Subtitling of Atayalic Speech in Indigenous Film from Taiwan,” Babel 68.3. Postprint
2021 “Walis Nokan,” Dictionary of Literary Biography 387: Chinese Poets Since 1949. Postprint
2021 “Teach Your Children Well: Traditional Education in Indigenous-Directed Film from Taiwan,” Taiwan’s Contemporary Indigenous Peoples, Routledge. Postprint
2021 “The Hunter’s Gift in Ecorealist Indigenous Fiction from Taiwan,” Indigenous Knowledge in Taiwan and Beyond, Springer. Postprint
2021 “Ecologising Seediq: Towards an Ecology of an Endangered Indigenous Language from Taiwan,” International Journal of Taiwan Studies 4.1. Postprint
2020 “Putting More Words in Chief Seattle’s Mouth: A Seediq Translation of Chief Seattle’s Speech,” Ora Nui 4. Postprint
2020 “Translation in the Dialect Dynamics of a Multistandard Indigenous Language,” mTm 11. Postprint
2019 “Compromises in Translating Wu Ming-Yi’s Uncompromising Localism,” Ex-position 41. Postprint
2019 “An Ecotranslation Manifesto: On the Translation of Bionyms in Nativist and Nature Writing from Taiwan,” Chinese Environmental Humanities, Palgrave. Postprint
2017 “The Grammatical Artistry of Chinese Translation,” Routledge Handbook of Chinese Translation. Postprint
2017 “Mona Rudo’s Scar: Two Notions of National Identity in Seediq Bale,” Taiwan Cinema, Routledge. Postprint
2016 “The Apotheosis of Montage: The Videomosaic in The Man with the Compound Eyes as a Postmodern Ecological Sublime,” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 28.2. Postprint
2015 “Screwed by Fate? The Prostitute and the Critique of Liberalism in Backed Against the Sea,” Reading Wang Wenxing, Cornell University Press. Postprint
2015 “Transforming Frontiers: The Imagined Geography of Taiwan’s Internal Frontiers in Postwar Indigenous Films,” Taiwan Journal of Indigenous Studies 8.2. Postprint
2014 “Ironic Indigenous Primitivism: Taiwan’s First ‘Native Feature’ in an Era of Ethnic Tourism,” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 8.3. Postprint
2013 “What I Learned Translating Wu Ming-Yi’s The Man with the Compound Eyes,” Compilation and Translation Review 6.2. Postprint
2013 “The Hunter’s Gift in Ecorealist Indigenous Fiction from Taiwan,” Oriental Archive 81. Postprint
2013 〈《不一樣的月光：尋找莎韻》──台灣首部原住民導演院線電影的教育意義〉，《原教界》49。
2012 “The Spirit of Deer Town and the Redemption of Li Ang’s Uncanny Literary Home,” Chinese Literature Today 2.1. Postprint
2010 “Romancing the Formosan Aborigine: Colonial Interethnic Romance and its Democratic Revision in Postwar Film and Fiction,” Becoming Taiwan, Harrassowitz. Postprint
2008 〈翻漢婚戀的再現〉，《台灣原住民族圖書資訊中心電子報》5。
2007 “A Tale of Two Settler Nationalisms,” Taiwan Studies in Global Perspectives. Postprint

Theses

2009 The Return of the Vanishing Formosan: Disturbing the Discourse of National Domestication as the Literary Fate of the Aboriginal Maiden in Postwar Taiwanese Film and Fiction, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Toronto. PDF
2002 Chan Grove Remarks on Poetry by Wang Shizhen: A Discussion and Translation, M.A. thesis, University of Toronto. PDF

Research grants

2021 Minority Autoethnobotany: The Role of Translation in Seediq-Language Descriptions of Plants — UGC, Hong Kong.
2015 The Seediq Translation of Seediq Bale — NSC, Taiwan.
2012 Primitivism in Taiwan Culture and its Discontents — NSC, Taiwan.

Selected presentations

2026 “The human in the loop: Relay literary translation and minoritized languages in the AI era” and “Born relay translated? Translating Syaman Rapongan’s Mata nu Wawa,” SOAS, London.
2025 “Minority Language MT and Language Learning in the Age of AI,” Conference on Translation Studies and Digital Humanities II.
2025 “Anthropocene-era Ecotranslation as Environmental Education in Sinophone Cities Such as Hong Kong,” 11th Asia-Pacific Translation and Interpreting Forum.
2024 “A Cultural Translation Journey,” Indigenous Language Speaker Series, University of Toronto.
2023 “Indigenous Autoethnobotanical Translation,” Society for Ethnobiology / Society of Ethnobotany, Atlanta.
2022 “Google Translate and Literary Transcreation: Kevin Chen’s Ghost Town,” Soochow University.
2022 “Seediq Autoethnobiology and Translation,” Cardiff University.
2021 Indigenous Cultural Translation on the New Books Network; “Writing Taiwan, Translating Taiwan,” with Wu Ming-yi, interviewed by Michael Berry.
2019 “Translating Sovereignty into Seediq,” AAS, Denver.
2018 “The Translation of Seediq Bale into Seediq as Interpretation,” SOAS.
2017 “From Minority TS to Moribund TS,” Translation and Minority II, University of Ottawa.

Graduate supervision

2023– Hu Jiaxing, exophonic writing and self-translation in 1940s Britain.
2021 Diao Hong, Anna Holmwood as agent-translator of the Condor Heroes series.
2016–17 M.A. theses on picture books, Le Guin in Chinese, Taiwanese-language subtitles, and Madame Chiang Kai-shek as interpreter at Cairo.

Interviews

2023 Nancy Tsai, “No Translator Is an Island: A Dialogue with Darryl Sterk,” 翻譯學研究集刊 26.
2023 “Translating Taiwan and Riding the Iron Horse of Fate in Nature,” Chinese Literature and Thought Today 54.
2020 “Meet the Translator,” Where There’s Ink There’s Paper.
2017 “Darryl Sterk, Translator, Translation Scholar,” interview with Anthony Pym.