Chantal Wright is Honorary Fellow of the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at Durham University and Visiting Fellow of the School of Translation and Interpretation at the University of Ottawa. She studied at the University of Cambridge and the University of East Anglia in the UK, and previously taught at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, the University of Alberta, and Mount Allison University. Her research interests focus on the theory and practice of literary translation, stylistics, and exophony. In 2012, her translation of Tzveta Sofronieva's poetry collection, A Hand Full of Water, won the inaugural Cliff Becker Book Prize in Translation. Chantal Wright has translated some of Germany's best-known children's authors including Milena Baisch, Zoran Drvenkar, and Cornelia Funke. In 2011, her translation of Andreas Steinhöfel's The Pasta Detectives was shortlisted for the Marsh Award for Children's Literature in the UK. From 2005 to 2008, Chantal Wright was the editor of Transcript, a European Union funded, online review of international writing published by Literature Across Frontiers at the University of Aberystwyth in Wales.

Yoko Tawada's Portrait of a Tongue is a meditation on language and equivalence between German, Japanese, and English. Wright's experimental approach to the translation draws attention to the presence of the translator and her role in mediating Tawada's original reflection on language for an English-speaking audience.