International Translation Day

English: The Francesco St Jerome by Palma il Giovane (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Happy International Translation Day everyone, or what’s left of it. 30th September is the feast day of St Jerome, the patron saint of translators, but until last year, I wasn’t even aware of it. This year, however, my Twitter timeline is awash with greetings, blog posts and ecards celebrating the day. Confusingly, the International Translation Day event put on by the Free Word Centre isn’t until Friday, but I’m definitely looking forward to it.

It feels like getting to all the fantastic translation related events going on at the moment would almost be a full-time job – I missed Anthea Bell in conversation with the BCLT’s Danny Hahn at the London Review Bookshop on Friday, and I won’t be able to hang around in London for the rest of the Notes & Letters festival at Kings Place – the cabaret evening with Ukranian author Andrey Kurkov sounds particularly interesting. The ITI workshop in Edinburgh is something else I’d have liked to get to, as is the Language Show Live at Olympia, and there are tweet-ups and meet-ups galore. While time, childcare and money don’t stretch to all of them, I am particularly excited about Other worlds: Publishing children’s literature in translation coming up later in the month.

Afternoon tea in Mayfair sounds pretty good on its own, and when you add in Anthea Bell (again!), Sarah Ardizzone, Barry Cuningham and Wendy Cooling as speakers, and a topic of children’s books in translation, well – I’m there!

So, what with one thing and another, it’s going to be a busy few weeks. I’ll try to keep up to date with reviews though – plenty of good books hanging around waiting to be read and written about, and that’s just mine. The boys aren’t short of reading matter either, so I’ll see what I can do.

Related articles

• Saint Jerome, freelance translator (wrightonthebutton.com)
• Translation makes us fall in love. (bltnotjustasandwich.com)