The New Zealand Centre for Literary Translation will next week launch a new anthology with over 20 stories from 20 different countries.

The anthology, Been There, Read That! Stories for the Armchair Traveller launch will also mark the establishment of the centre. The anthology took centre director Jean Anderson nearly four years to compile.

"In many cases, this is the first time the writer's work has appeared in English. Some authors are well-known within their language community, others are relative newcomers."The New Zealand Centre for Literary Translation will next week launch a new anthology with over 20 stories from 20 different countries.

The anthology, Been There, Read That! Stories for the Armchair Traveller launch will also mark the establishment of the centre. The anthology took centre director Jean Anderson nearly four years to compile.

"In many cases, this is the first time the writer's work has appeared in English. Some authors are well-known within their language community, others are relative newcomers.""In almost every case, the translator has selected his or her piece out of the desire to bring it to a wider readership and to share the unexpected pleasures of encountering a new voice."

"I think what we have got is a really interesting range of different types of texts. People will have their own favourites. Some of them are funny, some of them aren't. There isn't a theme as such. What I did was to ask the translators to find a piece that they really loved and trusted them as expert readers with literary sensitivity," says Dr Anderson.

Based at Victoria University, the New Zealand Centre for Literary Translation hopes to be able to offer a translator residency in the near future, dependent on funding.

It has a core group of translators from the Asian and European Languages department at Victoria, but also plans to work with translators from outside the University and even outside New Zealand, as is the case for the anthology.

Dr Anderson says literary translation is much closer to creative writing than is generally understood. "For us, the launch is partly about education - most people don't really know what is involved in literary translation."

"As a centre, we are going to have two mission statements. One is to do whatever we can to increase awareness of what literary translation is, and increase the amount of translation into New Zealand English. The other is to assist with the translation of New Zealand writers into other languages. Both these activities will be supported by research into the processes and reception of translated works. "

27/02/08