Promoting Translation into Foreign Languages

A review of national translation policies reveals that all EU countries and many others have in recent decades established mechanisms for systematically translating national literatures into foreign languages. This chapter focuses on how translation as an element of cultural policy is employed in Slovenia. As is the case with all cultural policies, the translation policy in Slovenia has been significantly under-researched, which has contributed in part to the spontaneous cultural policy decisions in this area that hinder the optimisation of funding dedicated to translation from Slovene. Support given to translation according to the type of content is presented in its historical devel­opment, which grew significantly after the independence of Slovenia.

An analysis of publishing practices in different cultural contexts shows that public support is increasingly becoming an important factor in shaping both publishing programmes and public literary life. This trend will continue given the fall in the income from published book sales, especially when it comes to more demanding texts, which tend to be canonical and more likely to be the ones chosen by national cultural policies to be introduced to other lingua-cultures. It can therefore be expected that national promotion of translation will increasingly become an important factor not only when it comes to the visibility of Slovene literary texts, but also to the possibility of their persistence in foreign cultures.