Photo: Ema Oštir
Alja Lipavic Oštir is full professor of German at the Faculty of Arts, University of Maribor and at the Faculty of Arts, University of St. Cyril and Methodius in Trnava, Slovakia. Her research interests include contacts between German and Slovene language, the development of multilingualism, migration and language strategies. When she studied German and Slovene in the 1980s, she was convinced she would become a translator and would mainly translate literary works. After some of her first published translations from German (Frischmuth, Gstrein, Mora, Schlink, Kishon, Jaud, Gier), her career as a researcher and university lecturer took her in a completely different direction. Nevertheless, she devoted herself to translation studies for several years and taught literary translation at the Faculty of Arts in Maribor. She is convinced that if you have been involved in literary translation once, you never shake it off and always think about translation possibilities, even as a reader of fiction.
