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. […]
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. […]
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. […]
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. […]
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. […]
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. […]
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. […]
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). ¨…*
At the recent Frankfurt Book Fair, the French president Emmanuel Macron paid homage to the translator’s profession, and announced the creation of a “real” prize in France for translation into French (Note: a number of well regarded translation prizes already exist in France). “Knowledge of language is knowledge of books, and such is the eminent role played by translators that I cannot speak here, before you, without paying them the homage we owe them, because translation is the first thing our diplomats do, indeed it is sometimes the heart of what they do. It involves avoiding misunderstandings, indeed sometimes avoiding little miscomprehensions, it’s about conveying. […]
As in previous years, EUNIC Warszawa, the European Commission Representation in Poland and the Polish Association of Literary Translators held a celebration in Warsaw on the occasion of International Translation Day. Throughout the day, thirteen classes were given by distinguished and experienced translators in high schools. ¨…*
For International Translation Day, the Association of Translators, Correctors and Interpreters of the Basque Language (EIZIE) launched an initiative to get one sentence in Basque translated into as many languages as possible.
The sentence was taken from a text (Berbelitzenak) written by Anjel Lertxundi, a Basque author, and is the following: ¨…*
