Translation has been a chronic trope employed in speaking of the mobility of cultural knowledges and information globally and their conversation, fragmentation, and reconstitution within specific histories and cultures. It is generally cast as a paradigm that opens out into a wider discussion, but the translator who emerges in the 'fictional turn' of translation places emphasis on the particulars of place and history. This article examines the embedded translator found in recent Canadian novels in English that explore World War II, its wake, and repercussions. It is the author's contention that a writer who situates the translator as a character of presence within his or her fiction and thus raises the visibility of that figure counters the paradigm of the 'embedded' wartime journalist as a concentrated and exclusive source of information through resistance to a singular source in a monolingual tongue; and question the simplification of complexity for the purposes of a pithy sound bite or easy understanding. The fictional translator in the texts by Michael Ondaatje and Kerri Sakamoto disrupt the habit of translation that prioritizes the comfort of the reader, and punctures the unviolated authority of a writer whose tongue is hegemonic and powerful and pervasive English-language media.