As a wheelchair user, I’m used to justifying my right to exist. It turns out, as a translator I’ve also found myself having to defend disabled characters’ right to exist. Like a lot of translators, I’ve always loved books. Though literature was my escape from the harsh reality of an ableist world, I’ve never felt represented in fiction. There are many wonderful memoirs written by disabled authors, but those are mostly directed at able-bodied people as a way for them to understand the hardships we go through. But I never find myself in the books I turn to for escapism.

Despite my love of literature, I studied psychology in college, but soon realized that going to a clinic or a hospital every day for work wouldn’t be feasible, since using public transportation in a wheelchair is far from easy in Argentina. Luckily, I had a plan B: I’d discovered subtitling software and translation through fansubbing TV shows. If I could work from home as a translator, I wouldn’t have to go into an office day after day. The first step was to go back to university to study literary and technical translation in English. Of course, it wasn’t an easy ride, given my trouble with Phonetics due to a slight deafness I developed after being given too many strong antibiotics as a child. Some instructors openly expressed their horror at my lousy pronunciation: they thought I had no place in their classrooms, and seemed to have no faith that I would even make it through the course.

Thankfully, there were others who supported me a great deal—they saw past my “flaws” and instead saw my potential. I made it through the course, and a couple of years after graduating, I was contacted by some colleagues who had just received a great opportunity: they were going to translate a young adult romance novel from English and wanted me to be their proofreader. They were legal translators, so they needed my expertise, mostly in how to deal with the intricate rules of dialogue punctuation and the supposed “neutral” Spanish that tries to bridge all the language’s varieties from the different Latin American countries. I said yes immediately—this was the opportunity I had been waiting for. After all, I had zero contacts in the publishing industry and no idea how to break into the literary translation market.

That same night, I started reading the novel in English in preparation, and soon understood that the main characters were disabled. I was surprised—this was going to be a book about disabled characters romancing each other. There aren’t that many novels where disabled people find love and a happy ending. Sometimes it seems we can only have tragic lives with even more tragic endings, instead of having a life full of love and affection while also being disabled. I didn’t hate Jojo Moyes’s bestseller Me Before You, but it’s problematic when this is one of the few references able-bodied people have for us. Sometimes we are sad, yes, living with a disability can be really hard, but we also have a right to search for happiness just like anyone else. I was overjoyed that I was going to be a part of bringing a book showing disabled characters in an authentic, positive light into the Spanish language.

The novel features a mostly nonspeaking sixteen-year-old girl, Steffi, who has selective mutism stemming from severe social anxiety, and a seventeen-year-old boy, Rhys, who is deaf. When Rhys joins Steffi’s school as a new student, the head teacher buddies him up with Steffi because she knows a bit of British Sign Language. I found it very sweet how, despite her anxiety, their relationship develops quite naturally thanks to Rhys’s openness: he doesn’t judge her and welcomes her into his world. They use sign language to communicate, though Steffi is not as proficient as he is. I knew little about sign language at that time, so I became even more excited about the project. The signed dialogue was set in italics, and I had to be very careful about this in the proofreading process. Not just that, the book had a lot of mixed media—text messages, chatroom messages, handwritten notes—all of which had their own fonts, so formatting took more time than I first expected. But it was fun, and everything about the book felt innovative.

Though the author is not deaf herself, her research was meticulous. She took a course on British Sign Language and is very respectful in her approach to both deafness and anxiety. I was impressed by the little details and comments that depicted the struggles of being disabled in an ableist world. The main character speaks of how people don’t know how to behave around someone who doesn’t talk, but the same goes for any kind of disability. People don’t know what to do with you; they try to give you help you don’t need, and then won’t give you the help you do need when you ask for it. Society is happiest when we remain behind closed doors. When people do have to deal with us and our specific needs—which most of the time are not that difficult to meet—they are embarrassed. Perhaps it threatens their worldview, where everything must be normative, perfectly packaged, and easy to understand. They think that disability would never happen to them, as if it is something they can control. It is likely that they haven’t had enough interactions with disabled people to really see us as human.

The proofreading was tough; there wasn’t enough time, and I was already busy with my work as a subtitler. It was a stressful period for me, so I was relieved when we finally delivered the Spanish translation to the publisher. To be honest, I was really proud of the finished product. So, imagine my surprise a few months later when we received the manuscript back, this time full of alterations. A few of the suggestions made sense, but there were two that were unfathomable.

Their first complaint was that the formatting was a mess. They didn’t understand why I’d had to use different fonts to mark the different media—it was clear to me that the editor hadn’t even looked at the source text. Their second gripe was concerning a section where the author gives instructions on how to make the signs that refer to Steffi’s family members, as a way of teaching the reader a bit of British Sign Language. The female protagonist’s parents divorced and both remarried, and she has two stepfamilies she truly cares about. This large family is central to the story, so describing the sign language for “stepbrother” symbolizes how much Steffi loved this character and misses him after his passing. The editor wanted to erase all these signs, saying the descriptions were weird and that the book would be better off without them. I took this as a personal affront—the editor was disrespecting both the author and the disabled community as a whole. From my perspective, the editor wanted to erase the disability, minimizing it as if it wasn’t the foundation of the book’s plot. Because, yes, it’s a youthful love story, but it’s also a disabled love story. The editor had completely missed the point of the novel; or perhaps they hadn’t, but what they’d seen had made them uncomfortable. Either way, they were erasing the novel’s essence: the disabled experience.

I remember writing a lengthy comment defending those paragraphs, and of course, the translators agreed with me and sent my comments to the editor. After that, I received no more feedback, so I never got to see how the printed version turned out. I only had the chance to read it recently, to prepare for this essay. It saddened me that the book was not widely available in bookshops, that I had to order it online instead. When I first revisited the novel, I felt a bit embarrassed but giddy at the same time. I knew these characters inside out and had cared deeply about them. The book ended up having a few mistakes, mostly in the formatting, which didn’t surprise me, since they’d meddled so gratuitously with my carefully placed fonts. But I was relieved to discover that the sign language descriptions hadn’t been removed. They’d also approved my addendum to the Author’s Note. I’d thought it important to mention that sign languages are different in every country and point readers to information about Argentine Sign Language, Mexican Sign Language, and Uruguayan Sign Language—the three countries where the translation would be launched.

In the end, my first experience with literary translation was bittersweet, but I’ll never regret working on a project that put disabled characters and their stories in the spotlight. Publishers should always consider involving disabled translators, copyeditors, and proofreaders when working with a book about disability, both in fiction and nonfiction, to ensure there is no erasure or whitewashing in the process, and that the topic is approached with nuance and sensitivity. We have a right to exist and be represented in all the spaces of daily life, not just books. If we don’t defend our community, it’s clear that no one will.