A week devoted to literary translations – approaching the February contest

07/12/2014

With regard to opening a new literary translation contest in early February 2015, Desk Creative Europe Serbia has been involved in two significant conferences gathered on the theme of providing support to the Creative Europe Program publishers. The first conference was held in Zagreb on 24th November at the initiative of Mladen Špehar, the Head of the Desk Creative Europe Croatia, where the participants were the desk representatives from Bulgaria – Vesela Kondakova, Slovenia – Mateja Lazar and Serbia – Dimitrije Tadić, as well as the publishers from these countries, whose projects were supported by the resources of the Desk Creative Europe: Andrej Ilić from Slovenian publishing house ‘Mladinska knjiga Založba’, Nikolaj Gingijanov from the publishing house ‘Avangard Print Publishing’ Bulgaria, Nataša Barta from the publishing house ‘VBZ’, Croatia, as well as Nataša Đelošević, the representative of the publishing house ‘Clio’ from Serbia. There have been words on the occasion of these gatherings regarding the competition success of the countries from the region regarding literary translation, as well as on the propositions of the new contest and the announced project evaluation criteria changes. Within the Creative Europe Programme, a special emphasis will be put on the European Prize for Literature laureates, while the publishers will be required to submit the detailed project budget (without the linear translation costs accounting in terms of the number of pages), which shall anticipate diverse costs – starting with translation all the way to publishing, distribution and promotion of the literary piece of work. The changes of the criteria and contest participation conditions have for their aim the target group expansion, increasing project visibility, as well as encouraging book market development. Having regard to this, a significant novelty concerns the contest concept concerned with literary translations when compared to the previous program (Culture 2007-2013), having in mind that the contest applicants are expected to have a more innovative approach to designing their promotional activities.

The other gathering, hosted by Desk Creative Europe Serbia, was held on 28th November during the Book Fair in Niš and this was an opportunity for the publishers from Niš to get introduced with the literary translation contest of the Creative Europe Programme, as well as to discover the details on the successful domestic publishing projects. Furthermore, most common mistakes occurring in the literary translation contest applications have been stressed in both of the conferences, and these would be: indiscrimination of the terms ‘distribution’ (‘dissemination’) and ‘promotion’, unfamiliarity with the term ‘audience development’ and hiring translators with insufficient number of formal references.

Efforts of the Desk Creative Europe Serbia to promote this contest in a special light are also derived from the fact that Serbia is one of the most successful countries in this contest of the Creative Europe Programme. Serbia is, along with Italy, in the third place in Europe based on the number of successful applications (six out of 18 applications succeed), immediately after Bulgaria (26/9) and Spain (22/7). Macedonia and Hungary also contribute to the success of ourregion with 14 submitted and 5 successful applications, Albania (8/4), as well as Croatia and Slovenia, with 18 submitted and 3 successful applications. A small number of European countries have one or two successful applications, while most of the countries have none of the successful applications.