The Translators Café

When a story crosses borders, it doesn’t arrive unchanged. Its rhythms shift, its humor bends, its images take on new meaning. In picture books and illustrated novels especially, translation is not just technical work—it’s creative work. It reshapes pacing, tone, symbolism, even the emotional weight of a page turn. Text and image move together, and both must be reimagined for a new language. In this conversation, Dasha Tolstikova and Lawrence Schimel explore how translated books expand not only empathy, but the very boundaries of a young reader’s imagination.

Three publishers present a translation project from their catalogue.

An essential overview of the latest data on the Italian book market in 2025, highlighting the main trends, the strong performance of children’s publishing, translation rights sold, and the funding opportunities for translations from Italian.

A translator opens up her workshop to discuss the challenges and creative solutions she encounters in her translation work.

Established in 2006 following a European Directive, the Public Lending Right Fund serves to compensate authors for lost revenue resulting from the lending of their works in public libraries. In Italy, remuneration is allocated to the most representative associations in each sector, which must use the funds for the benefit of their respective categories. The Ministry of Culture recently recognised Calibro, the Confederation of Book Authors, as the most representative association of authors of printed works. During the round table, we will explain how the Public Lending Right works in Italy and Europe and how it will be utilised by Calibro.

Fairy tales have ancient origins and have been passed down through the ages, undergoing numerous reinterpretations and rewritings, as well as new ‘translations’ in a dialogue between text and illustrations.

Three modern fairy tales that pay homage to tradition and retell age-old stories in a fresh new way.

Panel discussion with translators Eva Valvo and Andrea Romanzi, who have made two separate versions of Nobel laureate Jon Fosse’s book My oh my . Translators Laura Cangemi and Giovanna Paterniti discuss the different versions with the panel and the audience

A project supporting lesser-used languages as a strategic resource for dialogue between peoples and cultures, promoting peace, reconciliation processes, and sustainable development.

Children grow up between languages—sometimes literally, sometimes metaphorically. How do stories travel between languages and what changes along the way? What happens to humor, wordplay, and culturally specific references when they move into another linguistic world? Are some things in children’s books simply untranslatable—and what do translators do then? In this conversation, we will explore how children's book translators guide growing readers between cultures, experiences, and emotions. The discussion will also touch on multilingual childhoods and the role of books in helping young readers navigate complex realities. How do stories speak to children who grow up between several languages? How can literature address experiences of migration, war, or displacement without losing tenderness, imagination, and hope? Together, the participants will share examples of creative solutions, surprising losses and discoveries in translation, and the small “miracles” that allow stories to cross borders. After all, everything between us is a translation: between the language of adults and the language of children, between the world we inherit and the one we are learning to name.

The jury will provide an overall feedback to participants in the translation competition from Norwegian.