Nordic Translation Conference Report, Part 1

Well, the Nordic Translation Conference is now over, and I am pleased to say it was a great success. It brought together a diverse group of people: translators of technical, legal, and financial texts; translators of literary fiction or poetry; interpreters; subtitlers; editors; publishers; authors; people from embassies or from government agencies; translation agencies; booksellers; librarians; and more. The two things we all had in common were that we worked with or were interested in translation in some way and that we were involved with one or more Nordic languages. And yet, throughout the course of the weekend, we found that we could learn from one another, and that we had much to share with each other and explore together.

This conference was a first for the Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies in four ways: 1) it was the first conference they had that was organized by a PhD student (that would be yours truly); 2) it was the first conference they had on the Nordic languages (despite the fact that they are called GermanIC, they previously only had German); 3) it was their first conference on translation they had; and 4) it was the biggest conference they have had (we had around 150 participants, and many more were turned away, though we had expected about half that).

It was also a first in general for there to be a major international conference on all the Nordic languages and their translation, and people seemed to enjoy having the opportunity to meet colleagues.

In the following post, I will write about some of the highlights for me and I will try to include some photos as well.