British Council and Oxford University Press, in partnership with the British Centre for Literary Translation (BCLT) will hosted a literary translation workshop, based on the BCLT International Literary Translation Summer School, held at the University of East Anglia since 2000.
Through consensus translation, the workshop explored the challenges of understanding the author’s intentions and conveying them appropriately in the target language. Two parallel workshops were held, on translating short stories from English to Urdu and Urdu to English with the respective authors in residence. The English writer whose text was translated into Urdu was Sunjeev Sahota and the Urdu writer whose text was translated into English was Azra Abbas.
Participants explored in depth all elements of the text, from cultural nuances and historical context to linguistic concerns and punctuation. Participants of each workshop worked independently and met in plenary sessions on a daily basis.