The ALTA Emerging Translator Mentorship Program is designed to establish and facilitate a close working relationship between an experienced translator and an emerging translator on a literary translation project selected by the emerging translator. The mentorship duration is approximately nine months. The emerging translator is expected to choose a project that can be completed in that time, and they will only be advised on that particular project. ALTA's Emerging Translator Mentorship Program was founded in 2015 by former ALTA Board member Allison M. Charette.
About the 2022 Catalan mentee
Samantha Mateo is a translator from Chicago. She received an M.A. in Humanities from the University of Chicago, specializing in Catalan and translation studies. She most recently joined a university press as an Editorial Associate. Her interests and work concern minoritized languages and literatures, diglossia, heritage languages, and immigrant narratives.
Born to Mexican and Puerto Rican parents, Samantha has always been interested in literature and language, and was raised speaking English, Spanish, and Spanglish. She earned a BA in Linguistics from Columbia University in 2017. She wrote her thesis on Zazaki, an Indo-Iranian language spoken by Alevi Kurds in Eastern Turkey. Throughout her undergraduate career, she dabbled in the study of a number of languages. In her final semester of undergrad, she began studying Catalan, and immediately connected with the language. While working the next few years at a translation business in Manhattan, she would rush down to the Union Square Barnes and Noble café to attend Catalan classes in the evenings once or twice a week. After attending a reading featuring translators Peter Bush and Mara Faye Lethem, she decided to pursue a career as a literary translator. In 2018, she attended one of the Institut Ramon Llull’s estades lingüístiques in Girona and Andorra, where she met other students studying Catalan from across the world.
In 2021, she received an MA in Humanities from the University of Chicago, where she focused on Translation Studies and Catalan Studies. During her time there, she worked on short translations of Najat El Hachmi, Maria Climent, Irene Solà, and Mercè Rodoreda. She attended and remains an active participant in the University of Chicago l’hora del cafè and Catalan Book Club. She is also a member of the Chicago-based translator collective, Third Coast Translators Collective. In 2021, she served as an interpreter for author Eva Baltasar at the Toronto International Festival of Authors. She later participated in two international literary translation workshops: one in July, a Catalan workshop led by Peter Bush at Bristol Translates; and, in November, an Advanced Catalan-to-English Translation Workshop hosted by the Insitut Ramon Llull and the British Centre for Literary Translation.
In her free time, Samantha works as a social media manager for the world literature magazine Asymptote. She also volunteers as translator for the Easy Catalan language-learning YouTube channel and has appeared in one of their videos about Catalan language-learners in the United States. Learning and translating Catalan has helped Samantha reconnect with her heritage language and has helped her discover a new world of literature that she hopes to share with friends and peers.
About the mentor
Mara Faye Lethem’s work as a translator has been recognized with two English PEN Awards, a National Translation Award nomination, a Warwick Prize for Women in Translation nomination, three Dublin Literary Award nominations, and a residency at Art Omi’s Translation Lab. Her recent translations include novels by Patricio Pron, Max Besora, Javier Calvo, Marta Orriols, Toni Sala, and Irene Solà. She is currently translating the complete short stories of Pere Calders.
Catalan Emerging Translator Mentorship is offered by ALTA in partnership with Institut Ramon Llull.
