• The relationship between writer and translator
• Editing translations
• CEATL Hexalogue
• New versions of classic books
• The influence of film adaptation on everyday speech.

Speakers will include writers, poets, literary editors, scholars and many others.

More details on events are available on the website of the Book Fair and on Facebook.

The Turin Book Fair runs from 10 to 14 May 2012, at Lingotto (Turin – Italy).

The summer school is organised by Professor Naomi Segal (Birkbeck College), Professor Debra Kelly (University of Westminster) and Ros Schwartz, professional translator and member of the Translators Association. Tutors will be:

• Fred Pragnell (Arabic)
• Nicky Harman (Chinese)
• Ros Schwartz (French)
• Shaun Whiteside (German)
• Kevin Halliwell (Italian)
• Antonia Lloyd-Jones (Polish)
• Margaret Jull Costa (Portuguese)
• Robert Chandler (Russian)

The Summer School will be held on 9-13 July.

Further information is available at the website.

Dutch-English
writer: Gustaaf Peek
workshop leader: David Colmer

French-English
workshop leader: Adriana Hunter

German-English:
workshop leader: Katy Derbyshire

Japanese-English
workshop leader: Michael Emmerich

Norwegian-English
writer: Kjersti Skomsvold
workshop leader: Kari Dickson

Spanish-English
workshop leader: Anne McLean

The summer school will run from Sunday 22 July until Friday 27 July, and further information and updates are available BCLT’s website.

• Children’s books in translation
• Training and advice for translators
• Reports and studies
• Information on residences for translators and writers
• Information on new grants for translation
• Promoting resources to discover new books in translation.

This year’s Centre will have a special focus on China, Japan and the Arab Spring through translations, and speakers will include journalists, literary editors, poets and many others.

Partners of the Literary Translation Centre include The Translators Association, The British Council, Arts Council England, Words Without Borders and the British Centre for Literary Translation.

More details on events are available at the website.

The London Book Fair runs from 16-18 April 2012, at Earls Court.

After careful scrutiny of the submitted works, the jury decided in their meeting on 18 February 2012 to award the prize for best translation to Marina Pugliano and Julia Rader for Un Viaggio (‘A Journey’) by H.G. Adler, and the debut prize to Giusi Drago for È morto Tito (‘Tito is Dead’) by Marica Bodrožić.

The award ceremony will be held on 27 March 2012, 6:00 p.m., in the Auditorium of Villa Farnesina, Via della Lungara 230, Rome.

Eligible literary categories are poetry, fiction, drama, children’s literature (excluding picturebooks and textbooks) and literary non-fiction targeted to the general public. Priority will be given to Serbian literary works that have been short-listed or have won the relevant literary awards (for example the NIN Award, the Ivo Andric Award, the Milos Crnjanski Award, The Isidora Sekulic Award, etc.).

More information (including an application form) can be downloaded here.

The award ceremony was held at Kings Place in London, and was followed by the 2012 Sebald Lecture, given this year by Sean O’Brien, on the subject of ‘Making the Crossing: The Poet as Translator’.

• share information and experiences and develop contacts;
• take part in the programme of meetings, seminars, workshops;
• obtain information on and register with the World Directory of  Children’s Book Translators, the first world database of children’s  book translators available on-line free of charge throughout the year;
• obtain information and advice on the main topics of professional relevance, professional associations’ activities, translators’ residences and grant organisations, funding to translations for publishers.

Thanks to the collaboration with Bologna University SSLMIT whose students will practice simultaneous translation during the Centre’s meetings, and thanks to the Bologna Scuola Superiore per Mediatori Linguistici ‘Carlo Bo’, special attention will be paid to job training.

The Bologna Children’s Book Fair 2012 will take place from 19-22  March. The programme of the Translators’ Centre can be found here.

Associations of literary translators are cordially invited to send in information on their organisations and on their initiatives supporting literary translation. Material can be sent to:

Ms. Simona Mambrini
Via delle Tovaglie 12
40124 BOLOGNA
simona.mambrini@gmail.com

The residence, Villa Sarkia, is situated in Sysmä, a small town about two hours from the capital of Finland, Helsinki. Accommodation in the house is free of charge, but the guests are responsible for their travel expenses, and personal costs such as food etc. are not covered by the organisation.

For more information and details about the procedure for application, please check the organisation’s web site.

In 2007, soon after ÇEVBİR (Literary Translators’ Society Turkey) was established, Nesrin Altınova, who translated some thirty classics, reported that several of her translations were plagiarised by a number of publishing houses. One of them was Sefiller, the translation of Victor Hugo’s famous novel Les Misérables.

Subsequently, this title was included in a large scale study on plagiarism in Turkish translations carried out by a joint commission of ÇEVBİR and YAYBİR, the Turkish publishers’ association. In the case of Sefiller five editions by different publishing houses were traced – all of them based on Nesrin Altınova’s translation and none of them mentioning her name.

In 2008, ÇEVBİR started a court case against Engin, one of the publishing houses that plagiarised Nesrin Altınova’s Sefiller translation. The expertises requested by the court for every single edition involved considerable financial costs on behalf of ÇEVBİR, which is a serious obstacle to open more court cases. The translation of Sefiller thus functioned as a test case for the many plagiarised works of Turkish translators available on the Turkish book market.

In the summer of 2011, after a long juridical process, the Turkish court decided in favour of Nesrin Altınova. A last attempt to appeal resulted in a settlement, sentencing publishing house Engin to a penalty of 29,050 Turkish Lira (some 12,000 euro). The Sefiller case constitutes an important precedent in the many cases of plagiarised translations that are yet to be brought to court.

The closing date for applications is 2 July.

For more information and an application form (in French and German), please see the website of Passage & Co.

In its ruling, the Supreme Court considered that Loisto acted as a separate publisher, violating the Copyright Act by transferring rights from the original publisher without permission. The agreement on the transfer of rights between WSOY and Loisto was unlawful. WSOY violated the translation agreement by giving Loisto a translation for publication without permission to do so; as the book’s publisher Loisto, in turn, infringed the translator’s copyright by publishing the work. Taskukirja Loisto Oy was founded by the publishing houses WSOY, Otava, Tammi and Gummerus in 2000.

The Supreme Court decision strengthens the creator’s position in Finland and supports the development of creative industries. It is also hoped that the decision will contribute to achieving fairer practices in the publishing sector. Literary translators are largely underpaid professionals whose economic rights must be secured so that professional work in the sector in general would be possible.  Copyright compensations are a vital source of income to translators.

The Supreme Court’s ruling and the grounds for it can be found here.

For additional information you can contact Ms Liisa Leppänen, executive director of the Finnish Association of Translators and Interpreters.

The program supports translations from Eastern to Western, Western to Eastern, or between two Eastern European languages of canonical texts, as well as of contemporary key works in the Humanities, Social Sciences and Cultural Studies. Special emphasis is placed on translations of relevant works written by East European authors and/or by female scholars.

Deadline for application: March 25, 2012.

For more details please see the IWM’s website.

In the intervening three decades, Denissen translated amongst other things Boccaccio’s Decameron, prose from respected 20th-century authors such as Leonardo Sciascia, Curzio Malaparte and Umberto Eco and the poetry of Cesare Pavese.

The jury praises Denissen’s ‘precise knowledge of Italian in all its argots, registers and dialects’.

The award ceremony will take place during the national translation event ‘Nederland Vertaalt’ (The Netherlands Translates) on 25 February 2012.

Based on ideas developed over many years by the Association des traducteurs littéraires de France (ATLF) and the Assises de la traduction littéraire in Arles (ATLAS), as well as experiments carried out by the establishment and its partners, CNL proposes an experimental programme of training for young French translators who have already published at least one translation and wish to acquire a deeper understanding of the practice.

Entrusted to Olivier Mannoni, the chairman of ATLF, this project seeks to develop an innovative educational approach based not on the teaching of a language but on the practice of translation. Based on the transmission of skills, it relies on professional translators who are proven and acknowledged for their excellence.

Unlike traditional courses, this one is arranged around two time-schemes: in the morning, professional training, involving everyone involved in the world of publishing: editors, translators, rights managers, members of the legal team…; in the evening, collective, interlingual work on the translation of texts, bringing together about fifteen translators representing up to ten or so languages. The collective work will be supervised by well-known members of the profession, who will make the participants work on texts in various language (each language being practised by at least two student translators), the purpose being to communicate elements of translation technique, from the handling of dialogue in a detective novel to research and the treatment of sources in a historical book, taking in the techniques of translating poetry, theatre or cinema.

The Centre National will welcome the first CNL/ETL session starting on 7 April 2012, every Saturday, lasting for twelve weeks. Course fees will be paid for by CNL. Any additional expenses are the responsibility of the participants.

Application forms can be downloaded from the site of the Centre National du Livre and should be emailed before 29 February 2012 to the following address: CNL-ETL@centrenationaldulivre.fr

Successful candidates will be informed by post from 15 March.

For further information:
Florabelle Rouyer, creative writing department
tel: +33 (0) 1 49 54 68 30.

The virtual library www.readme.cc is an international literary portal which presents and links works of contemporary literature and their authors without regard to linguistic and national frontiers.

In co-operation with the Literaturhaus in Vienna a multilingual collection of reviews and samples of contemporary Austrian literature is being built up. Journalists and academics specializing in literature present the latest publications, and sample texts provide a brief view of the works in question, with short sketches of the authors to complete the picture. At present this material is available in five languages: German, English, French, Czech and Hungarian.

The translations are intended to make new texts outside the mainstream accessible in other languages and to provide an incentive for publishers abroad to publish them.

The reviews and biographical material are provided by the Dokumentationsstelle für neuere österreichische Literatur (Documentation Centre for Modern Austrian Literature), the translations by the Übersetzergemeinschaft (Austrian Association of Literary and Scientific Translators), and the infrastructure by readme.cc.

My Little War was published in the United States in 2010 by Dalkey Archive Press, and is the first English translation of Louis Paul Boon’s 1947 debut novel. The translation was financially supported by the Flemish Literature Fund.

The other titles on the shortlist were: Marjolijn Februari – The Book Club (Paul Vincent); Leon de Winter – God’s Gym (Jeannette Ringold); Anna Enquist – Counterpoint (Jeannette Ringold); Dimitri Verhulst – Madame Verona Comes Down the Hill (David Colmer); Douwe Draaisma – Disturbances of the Mind (Barbara Fasting); and Margriet de Moor - The Storm (Carol Brown Janeway).

The Vondel Translation Prize is a biennial award for the best book translation into British or American English of a Dutch-language work of literature or cultural history. The award was established by the Society of Authors and is funded by the Dutch Foundation for Literature and the Flemish Literature Fund. The winner receives a prize of € 5000.

The prize will be presented on 6 February 2012 at Kings Place in London, together with a number of other European translation awards.

For further information, please contact:

Peter Bergsma, Translators’ House Amsterdam
p.bergsma@letterenfonds.nl

or

Victor Schiferli, Dutch Foundation for Literature
v.schiferli@letterenfonds.nl

With (among others): Sandrine Fabbri and Yla von Dach, Pierre Lepori and Jacqueline Aerne, Jon Steele, Pierre Assouline, Bern ist überall and Bas Böttcher.

The complete programme is available here.

Join us on Facebook and follow the latest events.

The organisations responsible for ‘4+1 traduire’ are the Swiss cultural foundation Pro Helvetia, the Centre de Traduction Littéraire de Lausanne (CTL), the Collège de traducteurs Looren and the Fondation ch pour la collaboration confédérale.

ÇEVBİR – The Turkish Association of Literary Translators, condemns the arrests of intellectuals and the climate of intimidation

Turkey is currently witnessing a period as dark as that of the oppressive regimes which have left so many scars on its history. The Anti-Terrorist Law considers anyone or any organisation criticizing the existing system to be a potential terrorist. The expression of an opinion, or facilitating the expression of an opinion, is deemed a crime. Under this legislation, journalists, students, academics, writers, artists, translators, and lawyers are being detained. All segments of public opinion are alarmed by the unlawful and irrational arguments and evidence being put forward. Since the files of those illicitly detained are declared ‘secret’, the detainees are not even aware of the charges against them. They are thus deprived of the fundamental right to defend themselves. Almost from the outset, they are branded ‘criminals’. Subjected to long periods of detention, they undergo their ‘punishment’ before they are even brought to trial.

The present practices are not being implemented under martial law with its fascist rules, but under the regime of an ‘advanced democracy’, with leaders elected according to the principles of representative democracy. The Turkish state has eagerly embraced the idea of being the ‘role model for democratic government in the Middle East’, assigned to it by western states; it teaches lessons in ‘democracy’ to neighbouring countries ruled by dictators, and unequivocally condemns these states’ militarist practices. However, the way Turkey is treating its own people is reminiscent of the terror of the coup of 12 September 1980 and its aftermath. In publicly denouncing people from different segments in society as ‘terrorists’ without grounds, the government is becoming the principal instigator of terrorism. For years, the state has been incapable of bringing to court the murderers of Hrant Dink, a journalist-writer of Armenian origin, who was killed in broad daylight in the middle of the street in 2007; other murder cases are shrouded in silence, their perpetrators said to be ‘unknown’, even though the identities of the murderers are common knowledge. Just days ago, the Turkish state took the lives of 35 villagers, most of them still children, in Uludere, a town at the Iraqi border, in the name of ‘combating terrorism’. Yet when it comes to launching investigations and legal procedures on nebulous grounds, with the aim of silencing dissenting voices and imprisoning people almost en masse, Turkey does not hesitate a moment.

In a recent speech, the Minister of Interior Affairs referred to artists and intellectuals, academics, people working for NGOs, and citizens with a different religious or sexual orientation as potential criminals, thereby making them a target. This, combined with the exponential increase in the number of journalists and writers who have recently been detained and arrested, clearly shows that an atmosphere of intimidation is being created, with the aim of hindering all organisations and individuals active in the media and the publishing industry, in culture, art, civil society and the defence of rights, from executing their professions and activities.

ÇEVBİR, the Turkish Association of Literary Translators,

demands an immediate halt to the witch hunt against artists and intellectuals, human rights activists, and, ultimately, civil society as a whole – i.e. people who protect and create the values that societies have adopted for centuries by expressing truths that the authorities are attempting to stifle; it demands the complete abolition of the laws, regulations and practices that restrict and destroy freedom of the press, of opinion and of expression; and it reminds people everywhere that even if men and women are imprisoned, ideas and souls will always be free. We therefore adopt the smile that journalist Zeynep Kuray wore as she went to prison as the best response to the climate of fear and repression that is being fomented.

ÇEVBİR – Turkish Association of Literary Translators
İstanbul, 7 January 2012
www.cevbir.org
bilgi@cevbir.org