Off to Wolfenbüttel

Tomorrow sees the start of the annual three-day social gathering of German literary translators known as the Wolfenbütteler Gespräch. I'll be holding a workshop on blogging for translators. I suspect I'd be better at holding a workshop on pant-wetting during public appearances for translators, but hey. There are only three award-winning translators in my group, I'm sure I'll be fine.

I was asked to present the workshop, possibly because blogging isn't really something many literary translators do in Germany. Or to be precise, there are literary translators who blog, like my friends Isabel Bogdan and Rasha Khayat. But they tend to do so in more of a private than professional capacity. What I'd love to come out of the workshop would be a collaborative project in which German literary translators blog about their work, their books, the countries they're familiar with, and so on.

But to get started I want to show the group what blogs are already out there, think about the whys and wherefores, talk about what works and what doesn't, and give them a tiny taste of blogging by putting together a special one-off blog about the annual get-together itself. Watch this space for more details.