Creative Europe is a European Union program intended to support cultural and arts projects. The intention of the program is to emphasize and secure the national diversity of the inhabitants of the EU, to stimulate the cultural exchange between artists and their art and to increase the recognition of smaller nations in this union. The Culture program also manages the financial support of literature translation and its further promotion. The goal of the program is to ensure a higher offering of high-quality literary works, to encourage translation and emphasize the meaning of translators, to promote European literature and literature that has received the European Union Prize for Literature (EUPL) and reaching new audiences.
In the beginning we briefly introduce the theory of translation of literature and illuminate the dilemmas that translators are met with and explain why translating is so important and demanding work.
The focus of this research is the tender period between the years 2014 to 2020. Organisations wanting to gain support for translating literature had to meet the tender requirements: They had to be members or contract partners of the EU, they had to ensure a sufficiently high number of translations for a tender period and they had to have both a good organisational and operational team as well as adequate amount of own funding to co-finance the translation, publish and purchase the copyrights. On individual tenders the candidates were graded on appropriateness of the translated literature, its quality and content, the method of presumed promotion and communication, with an increased score given to the recipients of the EUPL. Received funds are non-refundable.
Slovenian publishers have been participating all seven years. Altogether 16 publishers translated 321 books from 32 different languages, also translating 7 Slovenian books to foreign languages and 5 books among other acknowledged languages. Majority was translated from English, French, Italian and German.
We have reviewed the tender requirements and the applications of Slovenian publishers, their success with gaining support and we examined the titles of books that have been translated, published and promoted with the help of the Creative Europe program. We have established that Slovenian publishers were very successful in these tenders, from the whole support pot of 20.554.010,01 euros they received 2.176.167,04 euros, which means over 10% of all resources assigned to support translation. Publishers have translated all kinds of genres of adult literature as well as a lot of literature for kids and youth, from picture books, poetry, grafic novels, short stories and novels. Translations from Slovenian were various contemporary literary works, novels, poems, literature for children, dramas, mostly translated into English and German.
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