Translation Workshop - #TranslatingEurope

On 8 October 2021, seven students from Gimnazija Vič attended the #TranslatingEurope Workshop – “The Diversity of Translation” in the House of the EU in Ljubljana, along with over 50 students from other schools across Slovenia. The Workshop was organised by the Directorate-General for Translation (DGT) with the help of different Slovenian societies for translation, interpreting, and language editing.

After we were divided into groups, we attended a workshop on interpreting in the House of the EU. There, we learnt about the positive and negative sides of the profession and the different types of interpreting that exist. After the presentation, we could test our skills with simultaneous and conference interpreting, with us even being able to sit and attempt to interpret in an interpreting booth – it is, unsurprisingly, a very difficult job.

Next, we headed into the Pionirski dom Centre for Youth Culture, where we were able to get familiar with literary, subtitle, and specialised translation.

In the workshop on literary translation, we were given the chance to dive right into work by translating a short story from English into Slovene. This workshop was a lot of fun as we could all give our ideas on how to translate certain words and phrases. We also discovered first-hand the troubles literary translators face when translating slang into another language.

The workshop on subtitling was equally interesting as we were able to translate part of a documentary film together. This workshop was especially educational as we got familiar with subtitling software and this was very enjoyable for all of us.

The final workshop, which was on specialised translation, was also very informative. As before, we almost immediately set our sights on translating a piece of specialised literature, which, in our case, was a user manual. It was the most difficult out of the last three workshops as there were many technical terms which we found hard to translate.

Throughout all four workshops, every presenter had a language editor at their side who was there to tell us about their profession, and to help us with the grammar and orthography of our translations.

At the end of the day, we were all very pleased to have been part of this series of workshops on the topic of translation and are looking forward to any similar workshops which we may have the pleasure of attending in the future.

Rok Sušnik