SPECIAL PRESENCE AT #ATA57 – Guest Speaker and more

This is it! We are a few hours away from our biggest event and we’d like to highlight our Guest Speaker 2016.

A Guest Speaker is someone who is not a PLD member but who can contribute greatly to our experience at the Conference. This year we are very proud to have Daniel Hahn, an award-winning translator who has translated authors such as José Saramago into English and who was shortlisted for this year’s Man Booker International Prize. You can read about him here.

He will share his extensive experience promoting Portuguese-language literature abroad on the last day of the conference. He brings us two different views of the literary field, one that will delight literature geeks and another that will be useful for every translator who has to go beyond their core activities in order to be a professional in the world.

These sessions are a must see:

P-6 Being a Translator: The Rise of a Powerful New Professional
(Saturday, 8:30am-9:30am)

The role of the English-speaking literary translator today has expanded well beyond merely (merely!) translating literature, to become much more active as a player right across the book world. Translating is one thing, but “being a translator” today means being a scout, an activist, a performer, an ambassador, a publisher, a blogger, a marketer, a mentor, a lobbyist, a schoolteacher, a critic, and even a conference speaker. The demands are considerable, but so are the rewards. The increased professionalization, versatility, and dynamism of the literary translator has been crucial in increasing interest in international literature at every level, as well as fostering an improved appreciation of the translator’s own role.

P-7 Literary Translation in Action: A Close Reading
(Saturday, 10:00am-11:00am)

Translators of literary texts are translators of culture, of voice, of attitudes and idiom, texture, rhythm, of register and commas. Every text in translation is a composite of a million tiny micro-detailed decisions, deliberate or otherwise. For this session, some unapologetically geeky close reading (yes, commas!) will shed light on the myriad levels on which literary translation operates, remaking an Angolan/Portuguese/Brazilian text as an English one that is absolutely identical to the original except for all the words. Although the speaker will use a sample source text in Portuguese, attendees of all languages can benefit from this session.

And to top off 2016 as a great year for Portuguese-language literature in the world, Katrina Dodson will be at the ATA Conference receiving the Lewis Galantière Prize. You might have noticed how many times we have posted news about this very talented lady on our social media channels recently. She won the 2016 Pen Translation Prize, one of the greatest achievements for a translator. She will receive her ATA accolade for her translation of Clarice Lispector’s Complete Stories – no small feat. Let’s show her our appreciation! Stay tuned, place and time TBD.