The Global Translation Initiative (GTI) is a joint venture of Dalkey Archive Press, English PEN, the Free Word Centre, and Arts Council England, in partnership with organizations throughout the global translation community as well as national arts councils in Canada, US, England, Scotland, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand.
The Initiative was born out of a conference at the British Council in February 2008, where it was found that the crisis facing literary and cultural translation into the English language is in fact a shared problem of all the English-speaking countries. The translation crisis is a global crisis, and yet efforts to advocate for greater support for the translation community have up to now been contained mostly within each national community, with the result that the primary international relevance of the issue has not yet been fully established.
The goals of the GTI are to share information from the various sectors of English-language translation communities throughout the world (including funders, booksellers, writers, translators, media, and academic translation programs); to identify specific obstacles and sites of opportunity; to document the current state of translation into English globally and widely disseminate the results; and to create a multi-year campaign for change.
The first stage of the Initiative—an international survey of the various sectors of the translation community—was completed in early 2011.
You can download this study— “Research into Barriers to Translation and Best Practices”—by clicking here.
