Beyond Words offers the eclectic musings of a group of translators from eight countries working in seven languages specializing in a variety of genres, translating both contemporary authors and the modern world's great classics. Their ruminations on the world that lies "beyond words" make for fascinating reading for lovers of literature near and far.

Susan Ouriou is an award-winning literary translator who has translated the fiction of Quebec, Latin-American, French and Spanish authors. She won Canada’s Governor General’s Literary Award for Translation in 2009 for Pieces of Me by Charlotte Gingras, after first being shortlisted for The Road to Chlifa by Michèle Marineau and then for Necessary Betrayals by Guillaume Vigneault. The Road to Chlifa was also awarded an honour list placing by IBBY (International Board of Books for Youth) as were Naomi and Mrs. Lumbago by Gilles Tibo, This Side of the Sky by Marie-Francine Hébert and Pieces of Me. Necessary Betrayals was also voted one of the 100 best books of 2002 by the Globe and Mail. Another translation, The Thirteenth Summer by José Luis Olaizola, was runner-up for the John Glassco Translation Prize. She has worked as the director of the Banff International Literary Translation Centre and as faculty for the Banff Centre's Aboriginal Emerging Writers residency. She is the editor of the 2010 anthology Beyond Words – Translating the World.

Susan Ouriou's profile page

"Writers, translators, and readers of more than one language will consider this book both a treat and a tool, which, for this reviewer's part, hopefully translates to a "must read." Peter Worden Alberta Views "It is stimulating to confront in a short space how twenty-one translators with different approaches and attitudes face twenty-one different problems of translation in as many different ways. How does translating make us think about language? What can translators do, caught in the gaps between two languages? .How can poetry be translated? Is translation political? Should it be subjective? Is the translator translating him- or herself? .That all these questions are raised cogently and in brief form in this book reveals to the reader the multilayered complexity that every translation involves." -Burton Pike, World Literature Review