The Literary Translators Association of Canada (LTAC) and the Quebec Writers’ Federation (QWF) are pleased to announce the launch of the Jean Antonin Billard LTAC/QWF Mentorship Program in Literary Translation, which will be offered every two years starting in 2023 (alternating with the Karin Montin Mentorship Program in Literary Translation, launched in 2022). Named after a beloved member of the LTAC community who passed away in 2016, the mentorship program aims to support emerging literary translators in the early stages of their professional development.
For this first edition, we are proud to present our mentee, Élisabeth Savoie, and our mentor, Sonya Malaborza!
Passionate about theatre, art and literature, Élisabeth combines her experience in the dramatic arts with her love of oral language as a translator. For her, orality is like candy: broken, colloquial, sometimes faulty… spoken language is animated by all these colours and more, and in depicting them, a translation comes to life.
Sonya Malaborza is an active participant of Atlantic Canada’s literary scene. As a translator, she works mainly into French and has carried several novels, plays, poems and essays into that language from English, and sometimes – especially at night –, from Spanish. Translations to her credit include Ami McKay’s L’accoucheuse de Scots Bay (Prise de parole, 2020), which was shortlisted for the 2020 Governor General’s Literary Award, and Harry Thurston’s Icarus, Falling of Birds (The Anchorage Press, 2022).
Trained in translation, translation studies and sociolinguistics at the Université de Moncton and York University, Sonya takes great pleasure in supporting authors and translators behind the scenes at Ancrages, an Acadian journal of creative writing, and at Prise de parole, a respected French-Canadian publisher. She has been known to moonlight as a writer.
From the beginning of February until the end of May, Élisabeth Savoie and Sonya Malaborza will be working together on a translation project. Join us in congratulating our mentor and mentee, and keep your eyes peeled for an announcement about a post-mentorship event in early summer!