Gabriella Gaál (1966, Murska Sobota) is a playwright, publicist, literary translator and court interpreter for the Hungarian language. She lives in Šalovce, Goričko. In 1991, she graduated from the Department of Dramaturgy at the AGRFT in Ljubljana. Her mother tongue is Hungarian, as she lived in a Hungarian village where there was only one Slovenian family. Luckily for her, the Slovenes were her neighbours, so she was always in contact with Slovene from a young age, and she also attended a bilingual primary school. She started translating when she was still in high school, and during her studies in dramaturgy she translated mainly plays (e.g. by István Örkény); for her thesis “Hungarian Drama on the Slovenian Stage” she received the Prešeren Student Prize in 1991. In 1999, she received the Budapest Ministry of Culture Prize for her translation of a collection of Hungarian fairy tales about King Matthias, which represented Hungarian literature at the Frankfurt Book Fair. She translates contemporary Hungarian drama, prose, essays and poetry. She is very fond of translating the essays of the Hungarian thinker Béla Hamvas, and has also enjoyed translating László F. Földényi’s essays: A Hymn to Melancholy. Her Slovenian translations of poetry by contemporary Hungarian poets Gábor Schein and István Vörös were considered by the jury to be the best translations of Lirikonfest 2020 (from the target languages of the competition). She completed her bilingual primary school education in Genterovci, and attended grammar school in Murska Sobota. After graduation, she worked as a Hungarian translator at the Municipality of Murska Sobota and now works at the Administrative Unit of Murska Sobota. She is a member of the Association of Scientific and Technical Translators of Slovenia, the Association of Slovenian Literary Translators and the Slovenian Association of Conference Interpreters. She is one of the main Slovenian translators from Hungarian, with a large body of work.
