The Trinity Centre for Literary and Cultural Translation are pleased to announce their 2025 Poetry Translation Competition. The competition poem is ‘Like a Song - to 107 year-old Mumu on her Journey’ by Dong Shu-Ming. This competition is open to translators around the world, whether they are students, professional translators or simply passionate about poetry.
Deadline for submissions is Wednesday 10 September 2025
For more information about the competition and to apply, please click here.
This year’s featured poet is Dong Shu-Ming, a writer of Puyuma and Han heritage, based in Taitung, Taiwan. In this moving elegy, Dong pays tribute to a 107-year-old elder - affectionately called mumu - whose life story weaves together community memory, multilingual song, indigenous knowledge, and everyday resilience. Through richly textured imagery, multilingual cadences, and intergenerational echoes, the poem traces mumu’s life as a woman of the Pinaski community, spanning languages from Puyuma to Japanese to Mandarin and beyond. The poem invites translators to listen closely to its voices, rhythms, and historical resonances - and to explore how such a deeply local poem might travel across language into a new cultural space.
Now in its fifth year, the Taiwan-Ireland Poetry Translation Competition is open to translators around the world. Entrants are invited to translate this year’s chosen poem into English for an Irish readership, and to reflect creatively and critically on the journey from source to target language. Whether you are a student, a professional translator, or simply passionate about poetry, we welcome your voice. Enter this year's competition here: https://forms.gle/taQbQeUQanBJxnsB7
This competition is kindly sponsored by the National Museum of Taiwan Literature.
For further information please email the Trinity Centre for Literary and Cultural Translation at <littrans@tcd.ie> or visit the Centre’s website here.