The closing and certificate giving ceremony of "UPL-NSU Translation Workshop 2019" was held virtually on Saturday night.
The program was held on the official Facebook page of University Press Limited (UPL).
UPL and North South University (NSU) jointly organized the two-month long workshop in October and November last year.
Khaliquzzaman M Elias, professor at the Department of English and Modern Languages, NSU, and translator writer Prof Abdus Selim were the workshop directors.
NSU provided the logistics support of the 50-hour long workshop which was attended by 29 participants from different professions.
Many celebrated translators of Bangladesh joined the workshop as instructors and guest lecturers. They shared their practical insight in the field of professional translation and also guided the participants for their further development.
In the closing event, the first part was moderated by Mahrukh Mohiuddin, managing director of UPL, and the rest was moderated by workshop director Khaliquzzaman Elias.
Mohiuddin said the workshop is the first of its kind in Bangladesh where a leading academic institute and an esteemed academic publisher jointly conducted a professional workshop for translation (English to Bangla).
About 20 experts attended the program where they said the participants must know Bangla very well while translating their works.
Prof Abdus Selim said: "One of the two major successes of the workshop is building a network of translators among the participants. We will keep in touch with them. And, another one is UPL accepted our proposal to publish a periodical translation magazine."
Poet, essayist and translator Kaiser Haq said translation is an essential and important part of literature activity.
Writer Raju Alauddin said not just for commercial reasons, world literature cannot exist without translation.
Renowned poet Kamal Chowdhury said it is very necessary to contain the culture of the country while translating poetry into any language.
He said the meaning of poems will be changed if translation does not match from the source language to the target language.
Celebrated author and Director General of Bangla Academy Habibullah Siraji said: "We would become very happy if Bangla Academy was associated with this workshop. We have subdivided the translation branch, and submitted the plan to the ministry concerned by creating an infrastructure to give importance to this section.
"However, in the case of translation, I would like to say, copyright is one of the important issues.
"We have conducted a one-day translation workshop for the officials of our organization and plan to do it on a large scale later," he added.
In the program, UPL announced, with the help of NSU, a translation magazine will be published in January and June each year with a team of 20 participants in the workshop.
NSU Vice Chancellor Prof Dr Atiqul Islam, its Pro-Vice chancellor Prof Dr M Ismail Hossain, eminent academic Syed Manzoorul Islam, among others, attended the event.
