Balkan Translations Collider

Presentation of the results of six studies on translated literature from Balkan to other languages

➡ Dec 11, Saturday, from 20:15

Yana Genova , director of Next Page Foundation and founder of Sofia Literature and Translation House and Ivan Sršan from literary agency and publishing house Sandorf, Croatia present and comment the results of six studies on translated literature from Balkan to other languages, conducted in the period 2015 - 2020, that outline common trends and identify common difficulties.

The studies are part of the project Balkan Translations Collider where Next Page Foundation is a lead partner. The Balkan Translations Collider project was launched by Next Page Foundation in the beginning of 2021 in partnership with ARGH (Serbia), POETEKA (Albania), Sandorf (Croatia), Goten (North Macedonia), and the municipality of Podgorica (Montenegro).

Moderator: prof Ani Burova

➡ Joint the event on Facebook

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 of organizations, 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.

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.

Watch the recording of The Balkan Translations Collider presentation at the Sofia International Literary Festival in English: