The Susanna Roth Award is an annual competition for beginner translators up to 40 years of age, whose task is to translate a piece of contemporary Czech prose. […]
A call for the traditional Susanna Roth Award for beginning translators from Czech
75 years of translation celebrated in Denmark
The Danish Translators’ Association (DOF) was founded in 1944 and thus celebrated 75 years of existence in 2019. To mark the occasion, and not least to pay homage to the members and their contribution to the Danish literary landscape […]
They work hard, but earn little: freelancers in the Italian publishing sector
According to official statistics, in Italy more and more books are being published every year. Yet the workers in the publishing sector do not seem to derive any advantage from this: the fees are lower than ever and working conditions are increasingly hard. […]
Frankfurt homage inspires Czech translators to join forces in an open letter to publishers
At Frankfurt International Book Fair, translators were paid a homage by the Norwegian writer Erika Fatland, who said that “Translators, who are often ignored, are the heroes of literature that I deal with every day.” […]
Awarding of the 2019 Bastian Prize 2019 for translated literature into Norwegian
The 2019 Bastian Prize for Outstanding Literary Translation was awarded in the course of the International Translation Day celebrations in Oslo on 26 September 2019. The Bastian is the annual translation prize of the Norwegian Association of Literary Translators’ (Norsk Oversetterforening). […]
Call for applications: funded residencies for translators of Italian literature (deadline: 30 June 2019)
The Casa delle Traduzioni in Rome, a public library and cultural centre specializing in the subject of translation, awards funded residencies for translators working from Italian into their native language. […]
Inside the translator’s head – maybe the first comic book ever about the work of translators
Sitting for hours and typing away? With their noses in books and dictionaries? Aha, only apparently so! The lives of translators are full of exciting adventures and extraordinary experiences, although most of these happen in their heads.W głowie tłumaczy (‘Inside the translator’s head’) is the first comic (maybe even on a global scale, though we can’t be certain) about translators and their work: […]
Basque translators met Bulgarian colleagues (17-19 October 2018)
Last year representatives from EIZIE (Euskal Itzultzaile, Zuzentzaile eta Interpreteen Elkartea, the Association of Translators, Correctors and Interpreters of the Basque Language) traveled to Slovenia as part of the New Translators programme, and this year we were in Bulgaria October 17-19 to discuss the importance of translation in the development of literature and in Basque culture, among other things. […]
Czech translator takes a public stand against xenophobic comments
Michala Marková, a renowned translator from English and French, wrote an open letter to the Czech Radio Council, expressing her concerns about the unacceptable statement of one of its members, Tomáš Kňourek, who reacted to a broadcasted excerpt from her translation of The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst. Mr Kňourek called the author a ‘lecher’ dressed as a writer and his writing ‘filth’, irrelevantly attacked the United Kingdom and its approach to migration, mentioned the Muslim minority as ‘people’ in quotation marks, and implicitly suggested censorship would be welcome while attacking the editor in chief of the highly acclaimed radio station. […]
Agreement in lengthy contract conflict in Sweden
Swedish translators have entered into an agreement with the Bonnier Publishing Group almost a year to the day after the former Standard Contract between the Publishers’ Association and the Translators’ Section of the Swedish Writers’ Union was terminated. […]
Italian Translators’ Association STRADE addresses AmazonCrossing with an open letter
A panel on how to become a literary translator, organised by Amazon Publishing on 10 March 2018 within the Milan book fair ‘Tempo di Libri’, was the occasion for Italian translators’ associations to follow up on a dialogue with AmazonCrossing about their contracts with translators.
This dialogue started in 2014, after a European campaign involving VdÜ, Strade, ATLF and CEATL. A meeting between the parties was organized at the 2014 Frankfurt book fair. This meeting brought some improvements in AmazonCrossing’s standard translation contract and the parties left with an agreement to continue discussions as CEATL still didn’t deem it satisfactory. […]
Positive note in Dutch Cultural Policy 2018 – 2021
On 12 March 2018, the Dutch Minister of Education, Culture and Science, Ingrid van Engelshoven, presented the Cultural Policy for 2018 to 2021. Two positive points stand out: after years of austerity, the government will start making investments in culture again and secondly, reasonable remuneration for workers in the sector is explicitly mentioned. […]
Negotiations on new contract follow successful talks between the Swedish Writers’ Union and the Bonnier Publishing Group
In late November last year the Translators’ section of the Swedish Writers’ Union recommended its members to not sign any new deals with the Bonnier Group.
The Swedish Standard Contract was cancelled last summer and in late autumn Bonnier had presented a draft contract that was unacceptable to the literary translators. Among other things the draft took away the translator’s right to have ‘the last word’ in translations. […]
Three cases of plagiarism in Bulgaria
In the past year the Bulgarian Translators’ Union (BTU) has dealt with a number of cases of translation plagiarism.
Last March Prof. Ana Dimova, literary translator and BTU member, published an article entitled The (Un)known Joseph Roth: Translation or Transcript in the renowned literary newspaper Literaturen Vestnik. In the article she compared a recent translation of Joseph Roth’s stories into Bulgarian by Vladko Murdarov („Легенда за пияницата светец“, Black Flamingo, 2015) with her own translation of the same stories of thirty years previously („Гробницата на капуцините“. Избрани творби. Народна култура, 1986) and found the differences minimal. […]
Bulgarian Translators’ Union honours translator Iglika Vassileva
At the end of 2017 the Bulgarian Translators’ Union organised an evening dedicated to literary translator Iglika Vassileva and her interpretation of the works of Virginia Woolf in Bulgarian. It was the twentieth anniversary of the first publication of Vassileva’s translation of To the Lighthouse and a birthday anniversary of the admired translator. […]
Where are the translators? Now in book clubs too! (Spain)
In collaboration with two bookshops in Madrid and Barcelona, Casa del Libro Gran Vía and Casa del Libro Passeig de Gràcia, ACE Traductores has launched the Club de Lectura Traducida, a very particular book club where readers will have the opportunity to share their reading experience with the translator of the book in question. The translators themselves offer to participate in the club with a particular piece of work and then the association promotes and provides widespread coverage of the event. […]
Basque association visited Slovenia
Building on last year’s New Translators programmme, two representatives of EIZIE (Euskal Itzultzaile, Zuzentzaile eta Interpreteen Elkartea, the Association of Translators, Correctors and Interpreters of the Basque Language) travelled to Slovenia this year to take part in discussions about the spread of Basque culture and translation. […]
Swedish Writer’s Union advocates boycott of new contract from Bonnier Publishing Group
The Swedish Writers’ Union is advising translators in Sweden against entering into agreements with all publishing companies within the Bonnier Publishing Group, Sweden’s largest publisher. Eleven companies have been declared non grata by the Union.
This comes after the Bonnier Group introduced a new Draft Contract earlier this year, which is to be used by all its subsidiaries and which includes many changes for the worse for translators. […]
Dutch association starts video campaign to raise awareness of illegal downloading of e-books
The number of users of e-readers is increasing – a positive development, as it offers opportunities to bring a broader readership into contact with a diverse range of books. But it is also important to consider the negative consequences.
E-books are illegally downloaded and distributed on a large scale. As a result, writers and translators are increasingly missing out on revenue. To bring this issue to the attention of the public, the Auteursbond (the Dutch Association of Authors), with financial support from the Dutch collecting society Lira, made a short video. […]
STRADE demands state foundation for the support of literary translation and other news from Italy
It has been a busy autumn for the Italian Union of Literary Translators Strade.
Starting at the beginning of October, the association was one of the main co-operating partners of the Migrant Literatures Festival in Palermo, Sicily, which hosted a series of events under the title “Lost (and Found) in Translation”. A public meeting with representatives from the Italian Ministry of Culture, the association of independent publishers ODEI, the Municipality of Palermo and Strade opened the whole festival, by promoting the latter’s proposal to establish a State foundation supporting translation (as it is the case in many other countries). ¨…*