Katy Derbyshire is the translator of All the Lights by our very own Clemens Meyer. She’s currently working on a 927-page(!!) novel by Jan Brandt, while her most recent project weighs in at the other end of the scale – David Wagner’s Berlin Triptych, available from Readux Books.

For obscure reasons, literary translation is officially hot – to riff on Berlin’s mayor Klaus Wowereit, it is badly paid but sexy. It’s a thing people want to learn. Over the past three or four years I’ve been asked to lead several workshops on literary translation, at various levels and in various places. Every time I do it I die a thousand deaths, never knowing whether I’m doing it right. And then along came bcltuea’s Summer School Summit, which, we were told, would “bring together experienced literary translators from the UK and around the world who are interested in translation workshops and teaching methodologies.”

A chance, then, for those of us who teach literary translation by ear to sit down and talk about how we do it and how we could do it better. As far as I’m aware, it was the first time that conversation had taken place in the UK, although Germany’s translators do have “training the trainers” programmes in place. The BCLT summit followed a similar model on a larger scale, shepherding 38 participants through a series of very different workshops and then getting us talking about them in informal sessions afterwards.

I was asked to lead one of these sample workshops, alongside one on taking translation into schools by Sarah Ardizzone, one putting us in the strange position of understanding not a word of the Bengali original and few of the cultural specifics with Arunava Sinha, one on birdsong by poetry translator Sasha Dugdale, and sessions on editing and creative writing with Mitch Albert and Sarah Bower. The wide range of workshops reflects the many facets of teaching literary translation, with different age groups, aims and settings. More.

See: Ampersand

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