The Provision and Development of Training Resources for Croatian-English Translators

In the Croatian translation market, English has for some time been the number one language, and there is a vast number of texts from all sorts of genres that are translated into Croatian. Conversely, the volume of translation from Croatian into English is small but steadily growing. This direction of translation presents challenges to many if not most Croatian-English translators who are L1 (or A-language) speakers of Croatian and who often encounter difficulties when translating into their L2 (or B-language). This paper contextualises this practice by presenting data on the volume of books translated in this language direction, and on the profiles of those who work from Croatian into English. Our main focus is on how to train translators to work in this language direction and in particular, which resources are available to trainee and practising translators to acquire or augment skills. An overview is given of the various translation-related resources that have been published over the last 40 years and of the particular functions that they sought to fulfil. Over the last 10–15 years, handbooks for specific language combinations have become a commonplace resource that provide a grounded and step-by-step approach to key concepts and terms, followed by original texts and model translations that are accompanied by annotations. In line with this contemporary trend in pedagogical resources, we present and discuss a handbook published in 2019, entitled Translating from Croatian into English: a handbook with annotated Translations that was edited by the authors. We describe how the handbook addresses both trainees as well as practitioners in a practical way by outlining a functionalist approach to translation. In the handbook, principles of text analysis are presented in a clear and direct way and show how a translator may be guided to achieve a functionally appropriate translation into English. The contribution of the handbook to translator training and the translation market in Croatia (and beyond) is discussed with the prediction that the growing volume of Croatian-English translation will likely require the production of further resources specific to this language combination.