The Centre by Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi

Reviews call this smart and satirical--and I think it was perhaps too clever and too much satire for me to fully enjoy it, and maybe I also did not appreciate it enough either. At the center is a gifted but unsuccessful Pakistani translator in London makes pennies subtitling Bollywood movies, until her English boyfriend introduces her to an organization called the Centre. Cult-like and secretive, the Centre puts translators through an immersive process that makes them idiomatically fluent in any language within 10 days. At first she cannot believe it, then she gets invited to live and breath it, and then, after becoming the success that she had always yearned for, it starts to rot a bit for her. If you could become fluent in any new tongue as if by magic, have you really earned the right to know it? Do you really understand its culture, its heritage, its nuance? If you gain a skill without doing any work, are you cheating? Is paying a high fee to collect languages so facilely an extension of colonial greed, an entitled white hipster gimmick – or something even more sinister? The result of the apparent worldliness of multilingual people is not increased idiosyncrasy, equality or self-expression but translators who speak without accents, the kind you sometimes find in global cosmopolitan elites raised in the international schools and gated compounds. The deeper she digs the less she likes what she finds.