Meet the 2024 Mentees: Rachel Moles (Nepali)

Rachel Moles will translate a novel by a Nepali author.  

(Image Description: Rachel, a white British woman with long, wavy hair, is shown against a white background. She wears a grey-patterned dress and a silver necklace, and is smiling a little shyly at the camera.)  

Rachel Moles is a novice translator who lives in the North of England, where she also language-teaches, screen-writes, and acts. She’s very excited to be translating a Nepali novel by a first-time female author, to whose prose, vision, and voice she hopes to do justice. She has long aspired to translate well between Nepali and English (and has done some freelance translation) but until recently was not sufficiently confident of her competence as a reader of the one language, or a writer in the other, to attempt a project of this nature and length. (She’s still a little nervous, but trusts that any shortfall in competence might be obviated through conscientiousness.)  

Though a lover of both, she did not pursue either literature or languages academically—she studied philosophy and politics instead—and has ended up in a position to translate from Nepali rather by accident, having been based in Nepal between 2012 and 2020 and done various jobs for organizations like The Carter Center, DFID, and the UN. Her first translations were undertaken in the course of her employment, and so tended to be of newspaper articles and political party press releases. She realized then, in retrospect, that translation had always been a task and challenge she relished, though in school the only routine opportunities were in Latin class. Around the same time, she began reading stories in Nepali, going to see plays in Nepali, and so on. It’s a fascinating, often humbling, experience to become literate in a second language as an adult and then, haltingly, to gain access to a whole new literature.  

Rachel is delighted, if a little daunted, to have been selected for the ALTA Emerging Translator Mentorship Program and to have secured such a valuable mentor, at such an early stage in her development, as Manjushree Thapa. It’s somewhat rare for the Nepali-English pairing to be included in such a program, which makes her feel all the more fortunate. Her mentorship is supported by the South Asian Literature in Translation (SALT) Project.