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Maja Novković is another residentof theTROJICA AIR program for translators inBanskáŠtiavnica.
Maja Novković graduated in Slavic studiesat the Faculty of Artsof the University inZagreb andshe also participatedin the summer school of language and cultureStudia Academica Slovaca. She is a court interpreter for language. She has translatedѲپܰčí'short stories and the novellaV mene otca/ In the Name of the Father by(Društvo hrvatsko – slovačkoga prijateljstva, 2019) into Croatian. She also translated two grammar textbooks. InBanskáŠtiavnica, she has been translatingʱٱŠܱ'ԴDZSpolu / Together(Marenčin PT, 2015). You can find an interviewwith her on the residency on ourԲԱ.Here are some of her answers.
How did you end up studying the language?
My initial idea was to study Czech. When I came in to enroll, however, the Czech classwas already full, so I decided to take . In all those years that I have been in contact with language, I never regretted it. I started translating while I was still in school -- since thesecond year of university -- and I haven't stopped translating since.
Why did you decide to translateMartinKukučín?
It was a selection of short stories and it was a school project. I was finishing my Bachelor's degree and this project was introduced by Doctor Eva Tibenská, who tried to engage her students this way. It was basically my first literary translation and it was very challenging. Kukučín was a realistic poet, so his texts were really quite difficult for a translation debut. Thatparticular vocabulary was something I haven't encountered before, because in school, we studied standard . Many consultations were necessary, we were searching for many words in historical vocabularies, even the style was different.It took some adapting on my part and a lot of work.
What was most challenging when you were working on the novel Spolu?
When I was translating Kukučín, there were two short stories and I couldn't consult with the author. When I was translating Balla -- and the same is true for Peter -- , I was lucky to be able to solve uncertainties that could potentiallybe problematic for Croatian readers directly with the author. That is quite useful. The postmodern references are challenginginthe novel Spolu. It contains many quotes from contemporary --world and -- literature, so I had to find out whether all the quoted texts had been translated into Croatian. The problem was contemporary literature which either has not been translated or has not been translated well.
Another challenge I'd mention is the social context. It is different in my country than it is in ia and I had to find a way oftranslating words and phrases likevekslák, šٱá, Husákove deti, fernet. ia hadŠtátnabezpečnosť (State Security), in Jugoslavia, we had a similar institution, of course, but the question is whether to leave the wordšٱá and to add a footnote explaining it, or wheter to use its Croatian equivalent. It was a tough decision between footnotes and Croatian equivalents. In the end, it's a combination of both. The novel reads well and footnotes would slow down the reading.
