The director of the Cervantes Institute says that language represents a value.

Frankfurt (Germany), on March 17, the director of the Cervantes Institute of the Luis García Montero Institute, presented the Spanish program as a guest country at the Frankfurt Book Fair this Thursday, stressing that “Language represents value” and “This book is the best metaphor of freedom and values democratic”. García Montero stressed that the values that Spain defends are “equality between men and women and respect for diversity.” He also welcomed his commitment to dialogue and said: “For Spain that believes in Europe, the real wealth lies in democratic values and human rights.” Translation support Presenting a literary program in Spain as a guest country at the Frankfurt Fair, which was held in 2021, but whose participation was postponed until this year due to the coronavirus pandemic, the curator of the project Elvira Marco highlighted the diversity in terms of genres: narrative, non-fiction, poetry or graphic fiction works. Marco highlighted “the efforts made by Spain since 2019 to promote the translation of books into German and to connect authors with Spanish and German agents and publishers.” In total, 2 million euros (about 2.2 million dollars) were invested, which made it possible to subsidize the translation of 328 works into Spanish in five European languages: German, English, French, Italian and Dutch. In 2019, the Spanish Ministry of Culture and Sports increased the allocation of translation grants by almost 45%, as it is an “effective tool for the international dissemination” of literature in all the languages of the Spanish country. This year, at least 86 Spanish works will be published in German and will be sold in bookstores in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Of these, 40 have benefited from some kind of translation support. Communicating through violence and the language of tools On the other hand, the Frankfurt Book Fair, which will be held from October 19 to 23 this year, has decided to “suspend cooperation with Russian public institutions and publishers,” but welcomes independent Russian writers and publishers, Jürgen Boos told Efe. Presenting the program in Spain as a guest country at this international event, Boos said it would “offer free exhibition stands to Ukrainian publishers” at the Frankfurt fair. However, Boos believes that independent Russian writers and publishers are not very likely to attend the Frankfurt fair. Similarly, according to Boos, “the Frankfurt Book Fair talks with cultural institutions from Ukraine and the Baltic states to support Ukraine.” Ukrainian and Russian, like Serbian and Croatian, are two very close Slavic languages, so the population that speaks the language can communicate linguistically relatively easily without translation, but sometimes speakers do not for other reasons. “Language is part of national identity, but sometimes it can be politically instrumented,” Boos said when he stopped bringing people together because language was instrumental, reflecting the Russian invasion of Ukraine or the war in the former Yugoslavia. asian/cams (Photo)