Tamara Mikolič Južnič

Who takes the prizes? An analysis of the gender structure of Slovene literary translators

Inequality among genders is a topical issue in several fields of human society. Slovenia is known for being a country of equal opportunities for men and women: according to the EU 2017 Report on equality between women and men in the EU report from 2017, it is ranked the second best in the EU with respect to the overall gender gap in earnings between men and women and the third best with respect to gender equality in decision-making. Yet not all the fields display this equality in the same amount, translation being one of those fields where there seems to be an asymmetric imbalance. In the present paper, it will be shown how despite the fact that male translators are clearly outnumbered by women in Slovenia, both when considering career choices and with regard to the number of translations published, there is nevertheless a gap in the recognition of the quality of female translators, as shown through the prizes given for outstanding translations. The data analysed will include the gender of the students enrolled at the Translation Department of the University of Ljubljana since its foundation (1997), the list of the members of the most important literary translators’ association in Slovenia (DSKP), the list of literary translations published in given years, as well as the literary translation prizes awarded. There are five important awards for literary translators in Slovenia, the most prominent one – and the one with the longest tradition – being Sovre’s award. Preliminary results seem to show that men have received prizes much more frequently than women, although the trend seems to be undergoing a slight change in the last few years.  

Dr Tamara Mikolič Južnič is Assistant Professor at the Department of Translation of the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana (Slovenia). She has a PhD in linguistics (2008) and teaches courses in Italian language, as well as translation between Italian and Slovene at the BA and MA programmes in translation and interpreting. She is Head of the Italian Language and Literature Chair at the Department of Translation, University of Ljubljana. She has lead two projects financed by the European Parliament on the dissemination of best practices in interpreter training between EU and non-EU countries. She is part of the regular staff at the DOTTSS Translation Studies Summer School and has held lectures across Europe. Her research interests include sociologically oriented translation studies, translator and interpreter training, contrastive linguistics and corpus linguistics. She has published two books, one on the power relations among central and peripheral languages in the world translation system and one on contrastive and translational aspects of nominalization, as well as several articles on TS research and pedagogy.