Translator becomes activist

With Equatorial Guinean author Juan Tomas Avila Laurel facing arrest, a translator writes about becoming his voice to the rest of the world.

THE Internet has made the translator’s job infinitely easier. No longer must we spend hours in dusty libraries, sifting through piles of reference books like archaeologists. We can consult online dictionaries, search for words in different contexts, find slang in forums; we can Google-image unknown objects, even Google-earth the location of a story. Yet translate something from a country like The Republic of Equatorial Guinea and things aren’t quite so easy.