Mother Tongue Manifesto

Hello from Hannah & Will at Wind&Bones,

We’ve just brushed off our newsletter after a brief hiatus, and now we’re getting back to a monthly schedule of news and updates from Wind&Bones.

In each edition of our new newsletter, we’ll highlight one of the projects we’re working on. And to get us started, this month, we’re talking about translation…

Mother Tongue Manifesto: Translating Between Taiwanese Hokkien and Gaelic

Over the previous few years, we have worked with writers and storytellers in multiple languages. At Wind&Bones, we care about language diversity, and we love finding out what happens when stories find new homes in new languages. So last week, we launched the website for a new translation project, code-named Mother Tongue Manifesto, and supported by a grant from the Scottish Government’s Scottish Connections fund.

Over the next few months, we will be working with some brilliant writers from Scotland and Taiwan to commission and translate some brand-new stories in Taiwanese Hokkien (Tâi-gí) and Gaelic. We’ve brought together four writers: in Taiwan, Naomi Sím and Kiú-kiong, and in Scotland, Elissa Hunter-Dorans and Lisa MacDonald. Our writers will write new short stories in Gaelic and Tâi-gí, and then we will work collaboratively to translate these stories into four languages: Gaelic, Tâi-gí, Mandarin and English.

For all the differences of language and culture, both Scotland and Taiwan have had similar experiences of language suppression and language revival. So with this project, we aim to explore these experiences together, while weaving new tales and new connections. The final quadrilingual collection will be published online in early 2025, and in paperback form later in the year.

You can find out more about the project at the website below. Keep your eyes peeled for updates as the project takes shape.

We’ll be publishing this under our publishing arm, Wind&Bones Books. And this collection will kick off the expansion of our publishing plans. We’ll keep you posted, but we have some more exciting books coming in 2025.

Other news

If you are interested in reading more about Tâi-gí / Taiwanese Hokkien, Will has just had a piece published in The Dial about the complicated history of decline and revival of this fascinating language.

Meanwhile, Hannah’s tale of unsettling bird-life, “Lady Amherst’s Pheasant” (first published as a part of our British Council funded project, “Dragon-Carving for Writers”) has just been republished on C. J. Anderson-Wu’s literary website Taiwan&Masticadores.

We are currently working with a few writers on our mentoring programme, but we also have some more slots open. Find out more here, and get in touch if you are interested in working with us.

This year’s free bilingual Mandarin / English philosophy salon series in Tainan, in collaboration with the Wansha Performing Arts Centre, has come to an end, with a fun session on philosophy and dance. In 2025, we’re starting up again in February for another series of ten monthly salons. We’ll keep you posted (with a new list of themes).

We’ve got some more big plans for the new year: new projects, new workshops, new publications… In preparation for this, we’ve been doing a lot of work behind the scenes. As well as giving our newsletter a refresh, our website has had a big overhaul, so now it should be much zippier!

And finally, we’re always up for fun new collaborations with individual creatives, organisations and collectives, either here in Taiwan, in our adopted home-country of Scotland, or further afield. We can offer one-off sessions, pop-up events or event series, creative production, workshops, lectures, consultancy, editorial support and lots more. Get in touch with any ideas you might have!

With best wishes from us both,

Hannah & Will

Wind&Bones