Translation center
Foreign publications often make it into our bestseller lists, yet the work of the translators is rarely acknowledged. Leipzig Book Fair put the spotlight on literary translation by opening the first Translation Center.
The Translation Center warmly invites everyone - professional visitors as well as anyone who's interested. It is located in hall 4, stand C403.
The Translation Center: So what is it?
The Translation Center is a meeting place for anyone interested in the subject of literary translation. This cooperative project is jointly supported by the Association of German-speaking Translators of Literary and Scientific Works ( VdÜ ), the Leipzig Book Fair and the German Translator's Fund .
Professionals, (prospective) young translators and interested readers are all welcome to attend.
Literary translators can use the Translation Center as a venue for professional training and mutual exchange, as well as for establishing and maintaining contacts within the industry and beyond. For anyone who is interested, there will also be the opportunity to find out more about this exciting area of literary business at the information stand and through lectures, panel discussions and participatory formats.
This is where nominees for the Translation category of the Leipzig Book Fair Prize are presented, for example, as well as the prize-winner later in the fair. The audience can learn what makes a translation particularly successful, while at the same time meeting the people who make foreign-language texts accessible to us. Areas that often go overlooked are thus quite deliberately brought into the limelight.
Overall, the Translation Center is intended as a forum for encounters and discussion to present the full scope of the profession and let visitors experience it live.
Translating is human
The Leipzig Book Fair Translation Centre – a stage for the art of translation – is celebrating its tenth anniversary this year. It was founded in 2015 by a group of dedicated literary translators together with the professional association (VdÜ) and the German Translators’ Fund (DÜF) in order to raise public awareness of the diverse and multifaceted field of literary translation, because without translations, world literature would simply not be accessible to the vast majority of people.
In this anniversary year, curators Maria Hummitzsch, Bettina Bach and Franka Reinhart have once again put together an extensive programme with a particular focus on the human factor in the translation process. One panel, for example, is about self-translation: Multilingual authors talk about how they translate their own texts into their other language(s). What is original and what is translation in this case?
In another panel, translators discuss the self-therapeutic aspect of their work, for example when they are inexplicably drawn to a particular text.
