What is the Balkan Translations Collider project about?
In early January 2021 Next Page Foundation launched the new Balkan Translations Collider Project in partnership with ARGH (Serbia), POETEKA (Albania), Sandorf (Croatia), Goten (North Macedonia), and the Municipality of Podgorica.
The Collider will work to bolster cross-border literary networks and cooperation both within the Western Balkans, and – on a larger scale – with other European countries. Although literary translation is at the heart of the project, the act of translating and the translators are not the focus of the project.
Instead, the Collider draws attention to the infrastructure underlying the process of introducing a literary work in translation to a new audience.
This includes a vast array of networking and communicative systems made up oforganizations, individual professionals, publishers, festivals, book fairs, and many more. Although these tend to stay in the shadow when thinking about what factors are key to translating literature, without them a translation would never take place at all.
In other words, the project focuses its efforts on the go-betweens, which in one way or another – often crucially – pave the way for a literary work to reach a new language audience through translation. A priority among those is given to literary managers, as the ones having the most opportunities to influence and steer the process.
Main activities
In its lifecycle the Collider will:
Undertake data driven research to determine the state of literary translations from WB languages to other European languages to identify trends, analyze and produce policy recommendations to address the current needs of the sector.
Organize academies for literary managers (in N. Macedonia and Albania) to develop skills and tackle together the current problems the literary professionals face when navigating the complex routes leading a WB literary work to reach a new readership.
Select participants from the academies for ten one-week internship placements in other European literary organizations to strengthen ties, develop new partnerships, and receive first-hand knowledge about how similar organizations operate in other countries of interest.
Finally, the project will close with a special event at the Frankfurt Book Fair 2023, dedicated to the theme of the project. Apart from external experts who will speak at the event, the project team and its experts will present the project results, products, etc.
Project news
Studies
The studies on the state of translations from the languages of the countries North Macedonia, Serbia, Albania, Kosovo, Montenegro and Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as a summary of the six reports are available here.
International Academy on Literary Management and Translation Promotion
The Translations Collider Academy on Literary Management and Translation Promotion aims to explore ways to overcome the imbalances in the literary translation traffic in Europe. The Academy spans across two five-day sessions:
Watch the film about the international Academy on Literary Management and Translation Promotion:
Internship placements
Details and first-person stories from the Academy participants' internships in literary organisations within the project can be read here.
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Watch the Balkan Translations Collider project official video:
The Balkan Translations Collider is a three-year project, co-funded by the Creative Europe programme of the European Union and by the National Culture Fund Bulgaria.
