Translating the Literatures of Small European Nations

About the project

This project was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) under its Translating Cultures theme, and ran from September 2014 to December 2016. The project team consisted of researchers in Czech and Slovak, Portuguese, Scandinavian and South Slav literatures from Bristol, Cardiff and UCL. The aim of this project was to understand better the ways in which European literatures written in less well known languages, which depend on translation to reach the wider world, try to break through to the cultural mainstream.

You can read our project report, based on the findings of our workshops and other interactions with professionals involved in the UK translation industry, here Project Report (PDF, 509kB). We welcome feedback on our findings, which should be sent to Dr Rajendra Chitnis (R.A.Chitnis@bris.ac.uk).

During our project, we organised:

a) Three public workshops:

• On the reader of translated literature, at the Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institute, with Nick Bottomley (Mr B's Emporium of Reading Delights), Stephanie Seegmuller (then of Pushkin Press), and Simon Winder (Penguin Books).
• On the 'choreography of translation', at the British Library in conjunction with European Literature Night, with Vladislav Bajac (Geopolitika, Belgrade), the translator Margaret Jull Costa, Susan Curtis-Kojakovic (Istros Books), and Nicole Witt (Mertin Literary Agency, Frankfurt).
• On literary translation, cultural diplomacy and international dialogue, at The Free Word Centre in London with Erica Jarnes (English PEN), Gabriela Mocan (Romanian Cultural Institute) and Sophie Wardell (The Free Word Centre).

b) An international conference: Translating the Literatures of Small European Nations, University of Bristol.

The conference gathered established and early career scholars working on a remarkable range of national literatures, including Bosnian, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Galician, Greek, Hungarian, Irish, Maltese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovene, Swedish and Turkish. 

c) An edited volume workshop, University of Cardiff.

We are delighted that a contributor to our conference and edited volume, Dr Ondřej Vimr, translation studies scholar and leading translator of Scandinavian fiction into Czech, has secured a two-year Marie Curie Post-Doctoral Fellowship at the University of Bristol to study the funding mechanisms for literary translation in Europe.