On a rainy Saturday in November, the German-Slovenian TransStar group gathered at the University of Ljubljana’s Faculty of Arts for its local meeting. To start things off, Tanja Žigon informed us about the logistical details for our January 2014 network meeting in Krakow. We also discussed our impressions of the Slovenian Book Fair, which we visited the previous day.
We then surprised our colleague Janko Trupej. He had defended his doctoral dissertation the previous Tuesday, and we presented him with a gift as a memento.
Afterwards, we discussed our translations. Our advisor Amalija Maček first pointed out typical pitfalls when translating from German into Slovenian. Each member of the group had brought along a text and its translation, and told the others which passages he or she had found particularly tricky or difficult to translate. We discussed stylistic questions; for instance, whether one can break up or combine sentences. The participants presented some formulations in their translations that they felt were not ideal or not the most suitable. There was a lively exchange of ideas and suggestions, and abstruse parts of the original were also discussed. It is precisely in such situations that teamwork proves especially useful and effective. After several hours of an extremely interesting discussion, we decided that we would send our translations to the advisor so she could correct them and suggest changes. We also decided that in the coming weeks we would each select new texts that we would like to translate over the following months.
We concluded the meeting with lunch at one of Ljubljana’s coffeehouses.
by Karmen Schödel and Ana Dejanović
Some photos are available here.
