This year I attended Bristol Translates Summer School (BTSS). I had previously attended the Spanish to English workshops with Rosalind Harvey in 2022 and so, like many, I was a returning student.
The first thing I noticed was the increased number of professional translators attending, both from the literary and commercial sides of the industry, in addition to the language afficionados and people exploring the translation industry that BTSS has always attracted. This year I had the opportunity to work closely with renowned translator Peter Bush on a variety of literary texts from Catalan to English.
I came armed with numerous questions and I wasn’t disappointed. We were a small group, which meant we worked hard but in turn received lots of feedback. We discussed everything from Catalan cream cakes to politics. As a minority language, Catalan holds a unique culture and political perspective within Spain and this needs treating sensitively during the translation process. Following a very interesting workshop on dialect in translation led by Kotryna Garanasvili on the Tuesday, we then put our new-found knowledge into practice working on a text using different Catalan dialects where we debated different ways of translating this (or not) into English. In fact, many of the subjects we discussed during the three days of workshops were further elaborated upon during panels and talks held by other established professionals, such as literary translators, publishers, and trade unionists. This enabled us to consider the role of the literary translator in the wider context, i.e. as a member of a team, and the consequent need to establish good working relationships.
As expected the existential threat that is AI was never far from the surface. This dominated one of the Meet the Tutors discussions on the Wednesday and also formed the basis of two of the Thursday sessions. Nonetheless, the overall consensus was that whilst some readers might not be particularly bothered whether a book has been written by a human or machine, it still needs to be readable and entertaining, which right now AI alone cannot produce. As things currently stand, AI does not understand tone or nuance, and it requires significant post-editing which takes just as long (if not longer) than human translating (see May 2025 blog). Additionally, let’s not forget that AI overlooks the human value of translating – events such as BTSS which bring people with a shared passion for translation together.
All in all it was a great week, and whilst I crawled into the weekend like a hedgehog ready to hibernate for the winter, I would thoroughly recommend it. I can’t wait to see what’s on next year’s agenda.