In the Magazine: Global Perspectives on Disability
Posted on June 15, 2026
By Emma Deshpande
As we look ahead to Disability Pride Month in July, WWB Campus is exploring the collection Translating Disability, published last year in Words Without Borders. Continue reading to discover two featured pieces, alongside teaching resources and suggested pairings from the Campus archives.
I became a translator because I’m autistic, but the irony is, if I’d been diagnosed earlier, I likely would have never become a translator at all.
In her introduction “Face Value: Translating Divergence,” Korean literary translator Clare Richards acknowledges that while her autistic identity complements her work as a translator, restrictive assumptions about neurodivergence and other disabilities might have prevented her from pursuing this career. The pieces in this collection, “written by us and not them, translated by us and not them,” as Richards asserts, reveal the broad spectrum of what a disability narrative looks like.
“The Hearing-Aid Brigade” by Adèle Rosenfeld, translated from French by Jeffrey Zuckerman, is a speculative story about Edwin, a man hired to interpret the high-frequency sounds inside a woman’s hearing aid. This story provides insight into how hearing aids function in noisy settings, such as a crowded train car. Through Edwin and his colleagues, Rosenfeld personifies the effort it requires to interpret sound from a hearing aid, which is something people unfamiliar with the technology might not realize. Show students an overview of how hearing aids work from the Hearing Loss Association of America, then have them reflect on these lines from the story:
I stuck with it through the summer; this machinery, this game of holey language had me besotted. My colleagues might have hated them, but the stints on the train turned out to be by far my favorite.
Compare the narrator in “The Hearing-Aid Brigade” to the protagonist in “Mrs. Saniya’s Holiday,” included in the Egypt unit on WWB Campus. How do both of these characters react to working under pressure? What differs in their relationship to their work by the end of each story?
And in “By Any Other Name,” an excerpt from Korean author Kim Heejin’s novel No Matter How Odd, translated by Paige Aniyah Morris, the appearance of a nameless, shadowy figure prompts questions about the relationship between names and identities in the broader world of disability politics. Pair this novel excerpt with “Oddly Ineffable,” Morris’s essay about Kim’s approach to naming, and how she preserved the meaning of those names as a translator.
For a class discussion, ask students to read Kim’s novel excerpt, then Morris’s essay. What is their initial impression of the interactions between Haejin and the shadow? How does this impression change after reading Morris’s analysis? Then, share the ADA’s fact sheet for writing about people with disabilities and the United Nations’ disability-inclusive language guidelines and have students compare these recommendations with Morris’s reflections. How does a varied approach to naming conventions relate to the diversity of the disabled community?
To continue the conversation about the significance of names (and when it’s appropriate to name someone else), pair these pieces with “Bruises” by Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro from WWB Campus’s Caribbean unit. This story, translated from Spanish by Lawrence Schimel, features characters who are given reductive and sometimes offensive nicknames based on others’ assumptions about them.
Other pieces featured in Translating Disability include an Argentinian translator's essay about fighting to preserve disabled experiences in a YA novel; a short story from Korea about a freelance writer whose hidden disability isn't recognized by government service systems; and a short story about a Russian refugee in Norway who cleans the cluttered apartment of an elderly deaf woman. Enjoy exploring this collection, and let us know if you incorporate any of these pieces into your lesson plans!