Within Switzerland

Translation House Looren collaborates with a range of Swiss institutions that promote and raise the public profile of literary translation, especially the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia, the University of Lausanne’s Centre de Traduction Littéraire (CTL) and the Swiss authors’ association AdS. The most important national-level cooperations are as follows:

• Every fall, the AdS authors’ association, which also covers Swiss literary translators, works with Pro Helvetia, the CTL, and Translation House Looren to organize a symposium on questions of concern to the profession. The symposium is held in Bellinzona every September, the day before the Babel festival di letteratura e traduzione opens there. In 2011, the meeting focused on the themes of copyright law and translation reviewing in the media.
• Translation House Looren is part of the group supporting the international literary event "4+1 übersetzen traduire tradurre translatar," organized every two years by ch Stiftung, the foundation for cooperation between the Swiss cantons. The event presents the creative work of translators in Switzerland and between the country’s four national languages, but also invites a different guest language each time. English will be the guest at the next 4+1 event, in Vevey on March 9/10, 2012.
• With Pro Helvetia and the CTL (University of Lausanne), a survey of translation editing at Swiss publishers across the country was carried out in summer 2011. The results reveal considerable differences between the German-speaking, French-speaking, and Italian-speaking parts of Switzerland.
• Translation House Looren supports the series of Swiss events held by Weltlesebühne, or "world reading stage," an association active in various German-speaking cities.
• We also cooperate on a continuing basis with the literary centers Literaturhaus Basel and Literaturhaus Zürich, the festival Solothurner Literaturtage, the literary translation prize Prix lémanique de la traduction, the cultural association Omanut, and the translation grant Zuger Übersetzerstipendium.

International

Translation House Looren regularly invites experienced literary translators to take part in its bilingual translation workshops. The workshops so far have covered the language combinations German/Italian, German/French, German/English, German/Spanish, and German/Turkish. In 2012 German/Polish will join the list. Since 2011, the bilingual workshops, which are now being offered at different locations and for many different languages, have been gathered under the title Viceversa. They are generously supported by the German Translators’ Fund, Deutscher Übersetzerfonds (partly through funding from the Foreign Office of the Federal Republic of Germany and the Robert Bosch Stiftung).

2012 will see the launch of the Fabrique européenne des traducteurs, a program developed in France with funding to support a new generation of European translators in six language combinations, as part of the European Commission’s Lifelong Learning program. In fall 2012, Translation House Looren, in cooperation with its Athens partner institution EKEMEL, will offer a nine-week workshop for the language combination German–Greek/Greek–German. Applications will open in Febuary 2012.