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The British Museum apologizes after using a translator's work in an exhibition in China without payment or acknowledgment.When the British Museum launched its “China’s hidden century” exhibition last month, writer and translator Yilin Wang began getting confusing messages from her peers. The show, which featured 19th century Chinese works including poems by feminist and revolutionary Qiu Jin, didn’t seem to include credits for translators, a friend told Wang. And yet, the Qiu Jin translations seemed to lift directly from Wang’s own work — was she involved in the exhibit? No, Wang replied: She’d never been contacted by the museum, which used her work without permission, pay or acknowledgment. A social media firestorm ensued, culminating in the British Museum issuing a statement Thursday that admitted the permissions and acknowledgment for Wang’s translations had been “inadvertently omitted.”It was an “unintentional human error for which the Museum has apologized to Yilin Wang,” it said, adding that it had removed her translations from the exhibition, and offered payment for the duration they were up, as well as for the translations that remain in a printed catalog.But these measures fall short and the apology rings hollow, Wang told CNN in a phone interview Friday. She criticized the statement for sounding passive instead of taking proper accountability. And, she said, it neglects to address the larger questions this incident has raised about ethics in academia and what she describes as the frequent erasure of translators — especially women and people of color.The online controversy emerged last week when Wang posted about the use of her translations on Twitter. “Please note this is a copyright infringement … I think you owe me some money for printing and exhibiting my translations, British Museum,” she wrote in a thread, noting that her translations — which had previously been published on her website and in literary journals — were also featured in the museum’s online guide and printed catalog about the exhibit. Her post has since circulated widely on Twitter, garnering nearly 53,000 likes and 15,000 retweets to date.
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