International Translation Day 2024

September 30 is International Translation Day. This date was chosen because it also marks the feast day of St. Jerome, a monastic leader who translated most of the Bible from Greek into Latin¹ and the patron saint of translators, librarians, and encyclopedists². The International Federation of Translators (FIT) is celebrating International Translation Day this year by drawing attention to copyright and translation, arguing that translation is human-generated content worthy of copyright protection³. In the United States, Gregory Rabassa was a gifted Spanish–English translator whose work helped fuel the Latin American fiction boom of the 1960s and 1970s. At the same time, he worked to raise the profile of translators by fighting for greater translator recognition and the ability for translators to hold the copyright to their own translations⁴. Of course, many organizations use September 30 to celebrate all linguists, including the UN, UNESCO, and the Globalization and Localization Association (GALA Global).

Take a look at the resources below if you are interested in learning more about the intersection of translation and copyright.

• Translation, an art worth protecting: Moral and Material rights for Indigenous Languages by UNESCO and Translation Commons (Online event on September 30, 2024)
• Translation and copyright: towards a distributed view of originality and authorship by Tong King Lee, School of Chinese, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China
• Translations & Copyright Fact Sheet by the Australian Copyright Council
• Language Data Ownership and Copyright in Translation by Milica Panić for TAUS
• The Importance of Practicing Cultural Translation by Erik Angelone for Kent University
• Copyrights of translated text, a brief discussion between OpenAI users perza and GlassAcres

Here are some resources and upcoming events related specifically to Japanese/English.

• Japanese Literature Publishing Project (JLPP)
• Translating Japanese Literature by University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries
• JATBOOK – On the Frontlines of the JLPP: A Conversation with Rebecca Gade and Lisa Wilcut by the Japan Association of Translators (JAT) (Zoom event on October 12, 2024 at 15:00 JST)
• Twenty-first Annual JAT Contest for New and Aspiring Japanese<>English Translators by JAT (Contest opens October 1, 2024 and ends October 31, 2024)

By: Audra Lincoln

Edited by: Syra Morii

Sources

1. United Nations. (n.d.). International Translation Day. United Nations. https://www.un.org/en/observances/international-translation-day
2. Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. (2024, August 30). Jerome. Encyclopædia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Saint-Jerome
3. International Federation of Translators. (n.d.). International Translation Day 2024. International Federation of Translators. https://en.fit-ift.org/international-translation-day/
4. Chen, N. (2022, October 14). Copyright in Translation: Gregory Rabassa. Library of Congress Blogs. https://blogs.loc.gov/copyright/2022/10/copyright-in-translation-gregory-rabassa/