Case Studies

Translation Day’ is an annual event held at the Faculty of Arts, University of Ostrava, featuring a competition for student translators from all over the Czech Republic, plus a conference and workshops.

Promoting language teaching and learning.

The Translation Day event – including the competition itself, plus the conference and workshops – is organized by a team representing all of the Faculty’s language departments. Representatives of the individual departments also coordinate the teams of reviewers for each specific language combination, who evaluate the entries and take part in the afternoon workshops at each department.
The competition has two categories: literary and non-literary translation from a foreign language into one's mother tongue. The entrants select the translated text themselves, but the size is set – seven to ten pages of prose or 40 to 50 verses for poetry.

In the first 5 years of the competition since the inaugural event in 2005, it has featured over 700 participating students from 10 different universities. There have been 21 guest speakers – including translators, interpreters and academics from Czech and Slovak universities.
After each of the first five Translation Days, a volume of proceedings was published – Translatologica Ostraviensia (I, II, III, IV, V) – containing the texts of the lectures given at the morning conference, extracts from outstanding student translations, and photographs from the event.
Selected papers presented at the conference are published in the peer-reviewed journals issued by the Faculty’s language departments.

Translation Day is in consistency with the current policies in the field of language learning because it is directed towards promoting new approaches to language teaching and learning and promotion of multilingualism.