Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan Mumbai has launched the regional project “Diamantenschliff: The Digital Translation Academy” for German literary translations into South Asian languages.
The objective of the academy is to offer a space for reflection, dialogue and creative work for young literary translators in the South Asia region. It aims to upskill translators with some or little experience in literary translation in order to deepen and broaden their knowledge-base in this field. The source language is German while the target South Asian languages for the first academy programme (which ran from May to December 2023) were Bangla, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Sinhala, Tamil and Urdu.
The activities covered the entire spectrum of literary translation. The comprehensive programme consisted of a cross-language lecture series with established translators from South Asia and Germany, genre-related translation workshops with external experts and intensive workshops with the respective language mentors through collaboration on curated texts and regular discussion sessions. It culminated in an exciting assignment of translating selected works of Franz Kafka into the South Asian languages, which one can read and listen to on this platform.
The project will continue to maintain the spirit within the framework of forthcoming regional projects.
