In partnership with the British Centre for Literary Translation we have a produced a dedicated Literary Translation website designed to celebrate the art of translation. The site contains details of events, workshops, background information and theory, and links to further resources. We have other sites that include information about literary translators and about courses for literary translators. We have produced websites for creative writing projects that will have translated texts these are Klandestini and I Belong.

In addition to a vast array of information relevant to translators the world over, such as listings of conferences, prizes, publications and key organisations we have commissioned lots of new material relevant to translators and those working in the realm of literature and language education and Reader Development.

You can read transcripts of a unique conference on Reader Development hosted by the British Council and the Spanish Ministry of Culture, as well as following the development of exciting new work by some of the best new translators who attended the British Centre for Literary Translation Summer School at Girton College in July 2003. Join in our translation discussion list and interact with a global community of translators, all eager to discuss, advise and animate dialogue around and through translation.

The Literary Translation website has been redesigned with new content and new features:

• Literary translation workshops – how to translate texts ranging from swearwords in Trainspotting to the Bible via Asterix, Tamil stories and Scottish poetry
• Events – readings, seminars, conferences, projects
• Resources – books, periodicals, prizes, organisations, links
• Webboard
• Chat
• News
• Online conferences
• Monthly interviews with literary translators
• New workshops will be added regularly

ARE WE ALL TRANSLATORS REALLY?

If you were brought up in Lincolnshire or New York, Belfast or Bombay, you will have soon learnt how to handle different kinds of English. You may belong to a household where other languages are spoken - in many parts of the world children grow up to speak three or more languages. Sensitivity to accent and difference are part of becoming a translator.

All reading is, in a sense, a kind of translation, a search for meanings in a text written by someone else. When listening to a Shakespeare play, if we are English-speakers, we must wonder what has happened to those words over the centuries, what were the different resonances of those words for the playwright, for contemporary and later actors and audiences. We realise the impossibility of ever pinning down 'an original meaning' whilst enjoying our interpretation. We also realise that there is some commonality in these readings sparked off by similar sets of words fixed in whatever version of Shakespeare is on offer. But as we come out of the theatre, that experience may be a subject of conversation, or could, if we are school or university students become the object of an essay.

Translators of a play by Shakespeare have to research the text, past and present performances, other translations and critical interpretations, and then make a radically different move. They must create in their language a new text, a new language that will develop through many drafts, re-writings in a constant toing and froing in relation to a Shakepeare text of which they will have to cultivate different versions.

Although the translator pursues many paths of meaning, his or her art reaches to create a rich and ambiguous language.

An art beyond the national - to the global.

This web site is testimony to the electronic globalisation of literature. Nevertheless, the global village of literature, like Nobel Prize winners and 'world' authors exists in multilingual national contexts where a Babel of languages means communication is impossible without translation. However much English strives to become the international language, film-makers,dramatists, novelists and poets persist in writing in their mother-tongue. Faced by a masterpiece in Gikuyu or in French, non-readers of those languages can be told of their beauty but will remain bewildered by an array of unintelligible letters. It is only the art of the literary translator which can release that beauty from its original linguistic confines.

This website gives a series of snapshots of the professional world of translation accompanied by workshops. These enable you to participate as translators across a range of languages and genres and interact with leading professional translators. We hope that the experience of this website will generate excitement in an activity that is a key form of communication and will develop new ways of seeing translation beyond the classroom and the handling of dictionaries. Whether it is with Asterix or Trainspotting, The Bible or the Miss Smillas, translators are touching the nerve ends and delicate tissues of another writer's body of words with care, imagination and humour. There is passion and attention to detail.