Literary Translation in Georgia

Georgian literature for foreign readers

Interest in Georgian writing abroad has grown steadily since Georgia was Guest of Honour at the Frankfurt Book Fair, and the Georgian National Book Center's translation grant program continues to support publishers who take on Georgian titles. Translating Georgian literature well requires more than fluency: the translator has to carry over a syntax that stacks clauses differently from English or German, a vocabulary rich in words for landscape, kinship and feasting that have no single equivalent, and a register that shifts between the colloquial Tbilisi of contemporary fiction and the archaic tone of historical and religious writing.

We translate contemporary and classic Georgian prose, essays and memoir, poetry and drama into English, German, French, Italian, Russian, Turkish and other languages, working with translators who publish in the target language and who are paired with a native editor. For publishers, we prepare the material that comes before a contract: a synopsis, a reader's report, a translated sample chapter and an author biography that fit the format grant bodies and acquiring editors expect. For authors, we translate manuscripts for submission to agents and competitions and advise honestly on what a sample needs to do.

Foreign literature into Georgian

Georgian publishers bring out a wide range of translated fiction and non-fiction each year, from contemporary novels and crime to popular science, history, business and self-development titles, as well as children's books and young adult fiction. We translate from English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Russian and Turkish into Georgian, with translators chosen for the genre: a literary novelist's translator is not the right person for a business bestseller, and a children's book needs someone who can write for a child rather than about one. Every translation is edited by a Georgian literary editor before delivery, and we can work with the publisher's own editor and house style.

Non-fiction brings its own demands: quotations from sources that already exist in Georgian must be found rather than retranslated, terminology in popular science and history must be checked against Georgian usage, and indexes, notes and bibliographies must be restructured for the Georgian edition. We handle these editorial tasks as part of the translation rather than leaving them to the publisher.

Poetry, drama and song

Poetry translation is a collaboration between a translator who reads the original deeply and a poet who writes in the target language, and we arrange exactly that pairing. Georgian verse has its own metrical traditions, and decisions about whether to keep form, rhythm or rhyme, and at what cost to sense, are made together with the author or the commissioning editor rather than silently. For drama, translation is tested against the stage: dialogue must be speakable, jokes must land in the room and stage directions must be practical for a production, and we work with theatres and festivals on performable texts and on surtitles for touring productions.

Song lyrics for recordings, musicals and festival presentations are translated to be sung, with syllable counts and stress patterns matched to the melody, and we supply literal and singable versions so that the artist can choose.

Film, television and subtitling

Georgian cinema travels to festivals worldwide, and every submission needs a translated screenplay or treatment, a synopsis and director's statement, dialogue lists and subtitles. We translate screenplays in standard format, prepare dialogue lists with timecodes, and produce subtitles in English, French, German, Italian and Russian that respect reading speed and line length limits, delivered in SRT or the format the festival or distributor requires. For foreign films and series released in Georgia, we translate scripts for dubbing and subtitles into Georgian, with a script editor adapting the text for lip-sync where the studio needs it.

Documentary work frequently involves interviews in Georgian dialects, Mingrelian or Svan, or in Russian and Armenian spoken in Georgia, and we assign translators who understand the regional speech rather than guessing from context.

How we work with publishers and authors

Every literary project starts with a sample: a few pages translated by the proposed translator, reviewed by the editor, so that the publisher or author can judge the voice before committing to the whole book. We agree the edition's conventions at the start (names and place names, treatment of dialect and foreign words, footnotes or glossary, spelling of the author's name in the target language) and keep a style sheet for the book. Delivery is scheduled in parts for long works so that editing can begin early, and the translator remains available for the copy-editing and proofreading stages of the publisher's process.

Rates for literary translation are agreed per project rather than per page, taking into account genre, length and schedule, and we can structure work to fit grant timelines from the Georgian National Book Center, Creative Europe, Traduki and similar programs. Around the book, we translate cover copy, catalog entries, press releases, author interviews, contracts and rights agreements, and we provide interpreters for author readings, festival appearances and publisher meetings. Rights and contract translation is handled by our legal translation team so that the publishing agreement is as carefully done as the book.

What a good sample translation shows, and what it cannot

A sample of eight to ten pages tells a publisher or author most of what they need to know: whether the translator has found the voice (the narrator's distance, the rhythm of the sentences, the register of the dialogue), whether the humor and the silences survive, whether the prose reads as prose in the target language rather than as a report on the original, and whether the translator has made deliberate choices where the languages diverge (Georgian's freedom with word order and verb-heavy sentences, its lack of gendered pronouns, its dense kinship and food vocabulary) rather than defaulting to the literal. It also shows how the translator handles names, dialect and cultural references, and whether the editor's pass has left the text clean.

A sample cannot show stamina across four hundred pages, consistency of terms and names over months of work, or the discipline of keeping a style sheet, which is why we pair the translator with an editor for the whole book and deliver in parts. When we send a sample, we include a short note on the decisions taken and the alternatives considered, so that the publisher can react to the reasoning and not only to the result, and we revise the sample once at no cost if the direction needs adjusting. For authors submitting to agents, we advise honestly on what the first pages must do in the target market, which sometimes differs from what they do in the Georgian original.

What to send for a literary project

Send the full manuscript or script if you have it, or at least a representative sample, and tell us the target language, the intended publisher or festival and the schedule. Let us know whether the author is available for questions, whether there are existing translations of the author's work we should be consistent with, and whether a grant application deadline shapes the timeline.