On Friday 9 and Saturday 10 December 2011 the thirteenth edition of the Dutch Literary Translation Days will take place in Amsterdam. On the first day a symposium will be organized on the theme of ‘”Translation and Zeitgeist: the shelf life of the translator”. Do translators have a sell-by date? Should they stop translating certain kinds of texts as they get older? How well do they feel their translations from decades ago have withstood the test of time? Has their approach to translation changed over the years? And what about young translators, who are confronted with the words of writers who are (much) older than them? What policy do publishers have? Do they take the age of translators into account? Are they prepared to give younger, less experienced translators a chance? Five speakers – older and younger translators, and a publishing professional – will focus on this theme, with opportunities for audience participation in the discussion. The symposium day will conclude with the presentation of the Dutch Foundation for Literature’s prizes for translation.
On the second day a large number of translation workshops will take place. In addition to workshops on language pairs that have been addressed before (French-Dutch, German-Dutch, English-Dutch, Italian-Dutch, Spanish-Dutch and Dutch-French, Dutch-German and Dutch-English), there will be new workshops for Norwegian-Dutch, Russian-Dutch, Dutch-Czech and Dutch-Turkish.
The symposium day will be attended by around 370 participants; some 200 translators have registered to take part in the workshops.
The Literary Translation Days are organised by the Vertalershuis Amsterdam/Amsterdam Translators’ House. For more information (in Dutch), see the website of the translators’ house.
<http://www.vertalershuis.nl/