Translation rights for books written in Slovene are quite often sold to publishers abroad.
The Slovenian Book Agency supports publishers regarding rights and licence sales and offers advice to domestic and foreign publishers regarding translators, rights holders’ contacts, organises B2B meetings abroad, study-trips to Slovenia for foreign publishers, as well as financial support for translation and publication in foreign languages.
In Slovenia, as in many other countries in the area, institutions such as a literary agency or independent literary agents were never properly developed. After Slovenia’s independence in 1991 and the establishment of various independent publishing houses, only a few of them had made it their mission to sell translation rights abroad. It has only been in recent years that this has developed further and currently Slovenia has around a dozen foreign rights departments within publishing companies, which also attend international books fairs – mainly Frankfurt, Bologna, London and Paris, on occasion also others. There is also a Slovenian national stand every year at the book fairs in Frankfurt, Bologna, Leipzig, Vienna and elsewhere.
Any sale of translation rights is a success, with a lot of work and time effort behind every deal. A total of around 100 translations of Slovene books are published each year in around 25 different languages, according to the Slovenian Book Agency database. Occasionally there are also publications in unexpected languages such as Odia, Tamil, Nepali, Mongolian or Vietnamese.
Since 2017 the Slovenian Book Agency has significantly increased its translation fund and in 2018 granted support to 62 translation projects and in 2019 to 63 projects applied for by foreign publishers, in comparison to 39 grants given in 2017. There are also an increasing number of translations that get published without financial support by the Slovenian Book Agency.
Publishers and Agents that specialize in translation of Slovenian books in foreign languages can apply for several funding schemes offered by Slovenian Book Agency.