Translation process
The translation process
It’s very rare to find someone who is steeped in a non-European language well enough to understand its poetry and who is also capable of writing poetry in English. This is why all our translations are collaborations. They’re produced either by poet-translator pairings, or as a result of discussions in our poetry translation workshops.
The translation process has three stages. First we look at the original poem: even if most of us can’t understand a word, it’s always important to hear its music, and to look at how the poet has placed it on the page. Secondly, the language expert produces a literal translation that’s as close to the original as possible. And finally, there’s the long and detailed negotiation that ends with the translated poem.
Browse
In this section you can read about the translation process that we have developed. Find out more about the translation workshops we run, and see all the poems translated in our workshops. You can read about the poet-translator pairings that we arrange and about how to translate with us here.
Below you can find details of recent and forthcoming workshops. You can also see a full list of all our workshops events past and future in the News & Events section.
Events
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11/06/2008
Workshop on Tajik Poetry: Farzaneh Khojandi, 11th June
For the third in our series of workshops concerning our upcoming World Poets' Tour, we were joined by Jo Shapcott and Narguess Farzad for a fascinating discussion about their translations of poems by Farzaneh Khojandi from Tajikistan.
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28/05/2008
Workshop on Sudanese Poetry with Al-Saddiq Al-Raddi
This special workshop that the Sudanese poet, Al-Saddiq Al-Raddi, attended with his translators, Sarah Maguire and Sabry Hafez, gave us a unique insight into his poetry.
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14/05/2008
Workshop on Turkish Poetry 14th May
In this workshop we translated a poem by Lale Müldür, one of Turkey's leading contemporary poets.
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