Literary and cultural exchange: translation trends in the Nordic and Baltic countries

ENTranslation practices in countries where the national language makes up a small percentage of the total languages in the world reveal an interesting literary-cultural relation between the source and target language communities. Increasingly, English has become the world language of translation, often used as both the main source and target language. Within the Nordic and Baltic countries, we find a literary field that provides a fitting environment for translations between the national languages. This paper aims to investigate the translation practices occurring between Estonia and the Nordic and Baltic countries and its correlation to the sharing of cultural solidarity. Translation practices between Estonian and the other Baltic and Nordic languages will be the primary focus of this paper, with a secondary focus on the use of English as a major language of translation. This paper presents the translation trends from 2006-2008 based on the data collected from UNESCO’s Index Translationum. Overall, this paper aims to investigate what these translation trends reveal about the current socio-cultural relations between the source and target culture. Keywords: Nordic and Baltic countries, literary translation, cultural exchange, literary recognition, socio-cultural relations.