April 2024: Upcoming Opportunities in Translation

April 13, 2024 | in News | by Kathryn Raver

From education to grants, Spring brings new opportunities for writers and translators! We distill some of the very best below.

CONTESTS

IMAGINE 2200

Grist is excited to open submissions for the fourth year of their Imagine 2200: Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors Short Story Contest.

Imagine 2200 is an invitation to writers from all over the globe to imagine a future in which solutions to the climate crisis flourish and help bring about radical improvements to our world.

In 2,500 to 5,000 words, show us the world you dream of building.

Your story should be set sometime between the near future and roughly the year 2200.

There is no cost to enter. The winning writer will be awarded $3,000, with the second- and third-place winners receiving $2,000 and $1,000, respectively. An additional nine finalists will each receive $300. All winners and finalists will have their story published in an immersive collection on Grist’s website. Stories will be judged by authors Omar El Akkad and Annalee Newitz.

The deadline for submissions is June 24^th, 2024, 11:59 PT. Learn more and submit your story here.

GRANTS & FUNDING

PEN TRANSLATES

English PEN’s biannual PEN Translates grant is now open for applications! This grant, which is open to UK publishers, was launched in 2012 as an incentive to publishers to pick up books in languages other than English. Since its conception, the grant has funded over 350 works of literature translated from over 90 different languages.

The grant funds up to 75% of translation costs for selected projects. Works of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, prose, and plays, translated from any language into English, will be considered.

Starting this year, English PEN is also offering a second award in partnership with South Asian Literature in Translation. PEN Translates x SALT is open to publishers anywhere in the world that are looking to publish works of South Asian literature. Submissions must have been originally published in any of the official or unofficial languages of South Asia by an author that is a citizen or resident of a South Asian country, or who is of South Asian heritage.

Applications for both grants are due on the 31^st of May. Apply here.

Sustaining Diversity: Translating the Literatures of Smaller European Nations

June 26, 2017 | in Essays | by Rajendra Chitnis

A new study investigates whether the growth in translations from literatures of smaller European countries is matched by an increase in diversity.

Smaller European literatures don’t necessarily come from geographically or numerically small nations, but they are generally clustered in what for, say, English, French, or German readers, are European peripheries like the Balkans, the Baltic, Central and Eastern Europe, the Low Countries, the Mediterranean and Scandinavia. They are written in less widely spoken languages, come from less familiar traditions and depend on translation to reach an international audience. A project called ‘Translating the Literatures of Small European Nations’, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, aimed to understand both the challenges and opportunities that exist for these literatures as they try to break into the cultural mainstream in the UK, and in June 2017 we finally published a report on our findings.

Our project brought together four academics from the UK who promote very different smaller literatures―not only through their teaching and research, but also through various kinds of public engagement and publisher collaboration: I work on Czech and Slovak at Bristol, Rhian Atkin on Portuguese at Cardiff, Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen on Scandinavian and Zoran Milutinović on South Slav at UCL. We sensed that we work quite similarly, in parallel or even in competition, without much opportunity to discuss how our smaller literatures perceive and promote themselves internationally and how they are received by readers. We suspected that this parallel, competitive experience applied more generally to other professional advocates of smaller European literatures, whether translators, publishers, literary agents or state and third-sector promoters.

Translating the Literatures of Smaller European Nations

October 14, 2015 | in Dispatches | by Julia Sherwood

Translators and scholars discuss stereotyping, globalization, and small sales in English-language literary markets.

Last September, three British universities—Bristol, Cardiff and UCL London—launched a two-year-long project on “Translating the Literatures of Smaller European Nations” in partnership with Literature Across Frontiers. The purpose was to “understand better the ways in which, through translation, these literatures endeavour to reach the cultural mainstream.” In addition to scholarly research, the project involves three public workshops and a conference.

The first of these workshops, held in February 2015 in Bath, explored the question of “Who Reads the Literatures of Small Nations and Why?”. I had the pleasure of attending the second workshop, “Choreography of Translation,” which took place at the British Library in London as part of the European Literature Night in April 2015 (a third and final workshop, on promoting literature in translation, is planned for early 2016). Featuring publishers Vladislav Bajac of Geopoetika in Belgrade, Susan Curtis-Kojakovic, founder of Istros Books, translator (and Asymptote Close Approximations nonfiction judge!) Margaret Jull Costa, and Nicole Witt of the Frankfurt Literary Agency Mertin, the BL event ended up being more panel discussion than workshop, partly because the venue was not particularly conducive to the workshop format.

By contrast, a conference at Bristol University on September 9-10 provided many opportunities for lively discussions. The participants were a perfect mix of literature and translation studies scholars and practising translators from across Europe, covering a range of smaller European literatures from Catalan to Turkish. I’ll try to highlight some of the major issues covered, divided into often overlapping categories.