16 The Linguist Vol/62 No/2
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For Clare Richards, translation and autism are interwoven,
but until she started an online forum for disabled translators
she didn't realise how many others felt the same way
It's almost exactly a year ago and I am
walking towards London's Southbank to
meet a fellow literary translator. One sensory
onslaught is replaced by another –
fluorescent train lights and ear-piercing
tannoy announcements become throngs of
people and chatter inside the tunnel leading
to the riverfront, and there is too much for
my eyes and ears to take in.
The air is crisp but I'm sweating. I am
notably nervous; I always am when meeting
someone for the first time, but this time
it is amplified as I really admire the person's
work, both as a translator and as an activist.
I am also excited. It's the same intense buzz
that comes from walking into overwhelming,
unfamiliar social situations, where the
stimulation can become nauseating
and/or almost euphoric – a fine line I still
barely understand.
When I arrive at the café, the translator is
already there. Naturally, I am expecting to
talk 'business' in some shape or form (isn't
that what such meetings are for?), but a few
minutes into our conversation, she says "I
think I might be autistic." This was the last
thing I'd expected. I didn't know a single
other autistic translator. Yet here was this
person whose work I'd followed for years,
and she was autistic too. It was also new for
her; it was only in the past week that she had
begun to consider that she might be on the
spectrum, after some friends of hers had
been asking themselves the same question.
As we continued to talk, I was astonished
by just how much our experiences
overlapped. It was especially true of our
personal relationships with language learning
and translation: the intense satisfaction we
found in poring over grammatical rules and
patterns, the act of taking a sentence in the
source and crafting it into something
Under the radar
