Sofia’s translators now have their corner, where they can meet with colleagues, sharing experience, solving complicated issues or just chatting on literature. The Literature and Translation House is the spot, recently unveiled by the Next Page Foundation. We hope that the House, warmly welcomed by the guild will fill in a gap in the life of translators over the past 25 years. The foundation aims at the encouragement of literature translations with the highest standard of quality, in relation mainly to what are accepted internationally as rare languages, such as the East European ones and Arabic. A house from the 1930s is the place where translators may now gather together with colleagues – it used to be the home of renowned Bulgarian painter Nenko Balkanski. The preparation works are still going on, but enthusiastic Yana Genova, CEO of Next Page gives us the details:

“Now that we have a roof above our heads, we are launching a program named Translation Labs and aimed at Bulgarian translators of literature. Those gather here almost every other Thursday, discussing professional issues that are not always related to their working language. The goal is a community of translators to be consolidated, who are more deeply interested into translation and are not only concerned with the timely return of the number of pages ordered by the publishing house.The foundation has now prepared and is constantly updating a database of translators, Yana says and adds:

“This group of people has been constantly diminishing – I am talking about those, translating from Bulgarian with their mother tongue being different from it. This is due to the labefaction of the respective university departments around the globe, on one hand and also to the lack of state funding for the advertising of Bulgaria’s literature abroad, on the other. There has been some recent movement in that direction, but the funds are still few.”

The so-called Resident Program is among the peaks of the House’s initiatives. More on it coming from Yana Genova:

“The program aims at providing an opportunity to translators, residing outside Bulgaria and interested in translations from Bulgarian, to visit the country for a period of 1 – 3 months. Thus they can work on a concrete project and see the authors they translate, if the latter are still alive.”

Young expert in Bulgarian from Poland Magdalena Pytlak was a resident of the House in January and February. She has taken over the heavy task to translate a very complicated Bulgarian text – Summit - a novel by Milen Ruskov /European Union Prize for Literature 2014/.

Kids are not forgotten by the House’s program and special initiatives are envisaged for them:

“We will have a specialized library with two types of books. We will be also thankful to any literature donations. Bulgarian authors, translated, with editions since 1989, is one of the directions that we want to develop with the purpose of creating a representative collection. The other direction will be history and theory of literature translation. The library will be open to anyone on certain days of the week,” CEO of the Next Page Foundation Yana Genova says in conclusion.

English version: Zhivko Stanchev