Sunday Submissions: New $5000 Global Humanities Translation Prize

Translators, spread the world: Northwestern University’s Global Humanities Initiative has established a new $5K Global Humanities Translation Prize.

The deadline for submissions is August 1, 2016.

The goal of the prize, according to the announcement being circulated by Northwestern, is to “encourage new translations of important literary, scholarly, and other humanistic works from around the world, particularly in non-Western languages, and thereby help bring greater international attention to such works and a renewed measure of academic prestige to the craft of translation itself.”

The annual prize will go to a “previously unpublished translation that strikes the delicate balance beween scholarly rigor, aesthetic grace, and general readability, as judged by a rotating committee of distinguished international scholars and literati.”

Further:

We are especially interested in promoting works that will help introduce a wider audience to underrepresented and experimental literary voices from marginalized communities, humanistic scholarship in infrequently translated languages, and important classical texts in non-Western traditions that have heretofore been inaccessible to an English readership (or for which a new translation is justified).

The $5,000 will come in two chunks: $1000 at the time of the initial award, followed by $4000 upon completion of the project. Northwestern University Press also commits to publishing the finished work.

Those who want to enter must submit:

• “A proposal that describes/summarizes the work to be translated, explicates its larger literary, historical, and scholarly significance, and offers a realistic timeline for completion of the project
• “An up-to-date CV
• “A sample of the proposed translation along with corresponding text in the original (no longer than 25 pages)
• “The names of up to three references (who will be contacted only when necessary)”

More details at the Global Humanities Initiative website.

Thanks to Margaret Litvin for sending this along. Please do send in other “Sunday submissions” suggestions: for authors, translators, academics, or critics of literature in translation. Or anyone else in the community, for that matter.