AFCC 2026 Translation Hackathon
WorkshopJayashree Panicker, Lim Li Khee, Nur-El Hudaa Jafar
Free with Registration
Bring along your favourite English picture book and join the challenge!
We're looking for family teams, friend teams, and even solo participants who are curious about language and storytelling. Your mission: retell part of a beloved story in your mother tongue, reimagining how its humour, rhythm, emotions, and character voices might sound in a new context.
There are no wrong answers here. Whether you're eight or eighty, this is a space to play with language, make creative choices, and discover how the same story can sound completely different depending on who’s telling it.
Guided by our facilitator translators, you'll find that translation is more than changing the words, it is about creativity, cultural knowledge, and finding what feels most natural. The session concludes with a sharing segment where participants can present their translated excerpt through reading, storytelling, or performance – your choice!
How This Works!
You can either sign up as a group or family of up to 5, or as an individual! For individuals who are signing up, you will be grouped into groups of a maximum of 5 according to the language that you will be translating into (target language).
Please bring your digital device for the activity!
This session is supported by the National Translation Committee.
translationcreativitypicture booksreadinglanguage learning
Jayashree Panicker (Singapore)
Jayashree Panicker is a writer and literary translator. Her short fiction and poetry have been featured in Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, The Epigram Books Collection of Best New Singaporean Short Stories: Volume Five, and Mahogany Journal. Her poetry translations have been featured in an anthology published by a Toronto-based publishing house, trace press.
Lim Li Khee (Singapore)
Li Khee enjoys learning new languages. She interprets and translates between English and Mandarin, while working hard to hold conversations in Japanese and Thai. She also writes about life and travel in a regular column for Lianhe Zaobao’s Fukan.
When not honing her literary craft, Li Khee can be found storytelling at the libraries, and working with metals as a manufacturing engineer.
Nur-El Hudaa Jafar (Singapore)
Nur-El-Hudaa is an editorial consultant and a published author and translator of children’s picture books, short stories and poetry. She has received awards such as the inaugural Mastera Prize for poetry translation and the Golden Point Award for her short stories and translation. In 2023, she was selected by the National Arts Council to join the Virtual Residency programme for poetry translation at the National Centre for Writing in UK. As an editorial consultant, she helps writers and publishers develop books for publication. Nur-El-Hudaa volunteers with the National Library Board as a storyteller.
Programme dates and times are subject to change.