For more details about the program and the application terms, please click here and here.

Application deadline: 31 May 2013.

From Thursday 16 May to Sunday 19 May 2013, translators, publishers and writers will participate in seminars and debates to analyse the issues and future outlook for the literary translation professions, including the significant changes taking place in the publishing industry since the advent of digital technology.

For more information, please click here for the Facebook page or here for the website of the book fair.

For detailed information on the residencies and the procedure for application, please click here.

Deadline for application: 31 May 2013.

The € 25,000 award, the highest endowed literary prize in the whole German-speaking region, is granted by the art foundation NRW (North Rhine-Westphalia) in cooperation with Europäisches Übersetzer-Kollegium (‘European Translator´s College’) in Straelen (Germany).

For more information, please click here.

The 2013 Leipzig Book Fair Prize in the category Best translation has been awarded to Eva Hesse for Die Cantos, her translation of Ezra Pounds’ Cantos. Besides working as a translator, Eva Hesse is an editor and the author of literary essays, including texts on Samuel Beckett and T.S. Eliot. She exchanged two hundred letters with Pound.

The prize is awarded annually during the Leipzig Book Fair to outstanding newly released literary works in the categories Fiction, Non-fiction and Translation. It is considered to be one of the three most important German book awards, together with the German Book Prize and Straelen Translation award. The winner in each category receives € 15,000.

For more information, please click here.

The 2013 Johann-Heinrich-Voß-Prize goes to Wolfgang Kubin, emeritus professor in sinology and a lyric poet himself, for his translations of Chinese prose and lyric poetry.  In 2007 Wolfgang Kubin received China’s National Award and the 2007 Pamir International Poetry Prize, the most important Chinese prize for literature.

The 2013 Friedrich-Gundolf-Prize for the Intermediation of German Culture in Foreign Countries is granted to Mati Sirkel, Estonian specialist in German studies, lector and translator, who worked at the Universities of Tatu and Tallin. His list of publications and translations shows an impressive range of topics from contemporary and classical German literature. Mati Sirkel has been honoured many times, most recently in 2009 when he received the Austrian Cross of Honour for Science and Art.

These last two prizes, both from the German Academy of Language and Literature, and endowed with € 15,000 each, will be awarded in a ceremony on 18 May at the Academy’s annual spring conference, which will be held this year in Tartu (Estonia).

This latest survey, which presents an overview of data for 2011, is more comprehensive than  previous editions as it takes into consideration several different factors that have a bearing on  translators’ eventual negotiating power.

The survey can be found here.

From this website you can download a PowerPoint presentation of the results of the survey (click on the left button ‘Inchiesta Tariffe’ under the ‘Risorse’ heading, then click on ‘le slide’ to begin the download).

• Bel Olid, President – Associació d’Escriptors en Llengua Catalana (AELC, Catalonia)
• Martin de Haan, Vice-President – Vereniging van Letterkundigen (VvL, The Netherlands)
• Holger Fock, Vice-President – Verband deutschsprachiger Übersetzer literarischer u. wissenschaftlicher Werke (VdÜ, Germany)
• Shaun Whiteside, Treasurer – Translators’ Association (UK)
• Ildikó Lőrinszky, Secretary – Magyar Műfordítók Egyesülete (MEGY, Hungary)

Giuliana Zeuli, the long-time representative of the Irish Translators’ and Interpreters’ Association, was nominated an honorary member of CEATL.

The latest winner in the translation category is Věra Koubová, translator from German, for her brilliant Czech version of the poetry collection Traumsaum by Richard Pietrass. The Czech translation, Z lemu snu, was published by Revolver Revue in 2012.

The program provides opportunities to host visitors from and in all V4 member states, to support the work and mobility of talented literary residents, to create a platform for information exchange, and to support development and promotion of the V4 literature in Central Europe. The 2013 edition of the Program will enable 16 literary residents (4 from the Czech Republic, 4 from Hungary, 4 from Poland and 4 from Slovakia) to carry out their literary projects in four host institutions in the period of 1st September – 30th November 2013.

For more details on the program and on application procedures, please click here.

Applications have to be sent in by 30 April 2013 (midnight).

The J. A. Hollo Prize is given annually to an exceptionally high-quality translation of a non-fiction book into Finnish. In 2013 it was granted to Miika Luoto and Tarja Roinila for their collaborative translation of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s collection of philosophical essays.

Both awards are administered by The Finnish Association of Translators and Interpreters (SKTL) and The Finnish Book Publishers Association and are worth 10.000 € each. The J. A. Hollo Prize is funded by The Finnish Association of Non-fiction Writers.

In announcing the award in New York, Freedom to Write Program Director Larry Siems praised Ayşe Berktay’s ‘tremendous courage in standing up one for PEN’s most cherished values: the right to speak and read in one’s mother tongue, and the beautiful effort to translate languages across borders’.

The award, which honors international writers who have been persecuted or imprisoned for exercising or defending the right to freedom of expression, will be presented at PEN’s Annual Gala on 30 April 2013, at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.

For more information, click here.

Natur & Kultur is one of the larger Swedish publishing houses. The prize was instituted in 1985 with the purpose of rewarding translators who have made meritorious translations into or from the Swedish language and is given to two translators every year. The prize sum is 4 700 euro each.

Laura Cangemi was born in 1963 and lives in Mantua, Italy. She translates from Swedish into the Italian and has translated writers such as Ingmar Bergman, Sven Delblanc, Peter Englund, P.O. Enquist, Monika Fagerholm, and Jan Guillou. She also represents Italian literary translators in CEATL.

Ulla Ekblad-Forsgren was born in 1937 and lives in Berlin. She translates literature from German and has translated Marcel Beyer, Judith Hermann, Friederike Mayröcker, and Siba Shakib, among others.

Participants will obtain a travelling allowance. Accommodation and meals during the workshop will be free of charge.

Application forms can be sent in by email and should be received on 2 May 2013.

For more information on the programme and application forms, click here or here.

A German-Polish jury under the honorary chairmanship of Karl Dedecius chose the two translators and praised their distinguished achievements as well as their mediation work between the two neighbouring countries.

The €10,000 prize is awarded alternately in Poland and Germany. The 2013 award ceremony will take place on the 24th of May in the International Culture Center in Cracow. The event is organized by the German Poland Institute.

Read more here.

The following translators and publishing houses were awarded a prize for their overall literary activities:

Bruno Berni (translator Danish – Italian)
Ileana Zmaranda Elian (translator Italian – Romanian)
publishing house Editori Internazionali Riuniti
publishing house Alma Books (UK)

Three special prizes were awarded to:

Barbara La Rosa (translator Turkish – Italian)
Mirko Tomasovič (translator Italian – Croatian)
publishing house Claudiana

With the current payment negotiations having been broken off by the participating publishers, the most important task of the German association of translators is to return to the negotiating table as soon as the Supreme Court has ruled on Hanser Verlag’s constitutional objection.

Members attending the VdÜ general assembly on the 2nd of March 2013 expressed anger and disappointment.

In his reaction,VdÜ president Hinrich Schmidt-Henkel said: “I share that anger. No matter what the publishers call it, this is an abandonment of negotiations. Nobody knows when Karlsruhe [i.e. the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany] will arrive at a decision, nobody knows what the decision may contain, nobody knows what the previous good results of the negotiations will be worth at that time.

It is a bitter disappointment: Our negotiating partners have left the path of mutual agreement and hope that the court upholds the right of the strong and tilts the legal obligations to be found in all reasonable contracts. Translators and all copyright holders hope for the opposite: that the legislature intends adequate compensation for them in the future – twelve years after the adoption of the enabling statute.”

Drawing on the concepts of minor, small and hegemonic literatures and their philosophical implications, the workshop which is meant to be a first step in a long-term research project, hopes to arrive at a ‘post-postmodern’ understanding of the essence and structure of what we call world literature.

Contributions are welcome from scholars, writers, translators, publishers, etc. on the following (and related) topics:

• Minor, small, and hegemonic literatures;
• Who translates small literatures into ‘world’ languages and why?
• Who reads (or does not read) these translations and why?
• Do translations change the standing and status of small literatures, a) in public, b) in the academia?
• Do translations from small literatures have an influence on how small cultures’/countries’ are perceived by their big counterparts and worldwide? (What does ‘worldwide’ mean?)
• How do (don’t) small literatures communicate with each other?
• Does a ‘small’ literature imply a ‘small’ literary academic community; does a peripheral history imply a peripheral historiography, and so on?
• The (re)active ideologies of (non)translatability, modernisation and mutuality.

Deadline for submissions: 15 May 2013.
For more background information, please click here.

Note: depending on the preferences expressed by participants, the workshop may be changed from 27-28 May to 26-27 or to 28-29 May 2013. The final dates will be announced by 1 May.

The new board will be concerned with the increasingly marginal place of literature in education, the social status of authors, co-operation with sister associations in film and theatre and convincing young authors of the importance of joint actions to improve their professional situation.

For more information in Arabic, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Swedish and Turkish, see the website.

The programme of the Translators’ Centre can be found here.

This new report is the outcome of a feasibility study undertaken by Literature Across Frontiers in 2012 with the support of Arts Council England, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and the EU Culture Programme. The purpose of the study was to recommend a solution to current problems in the form of a proposal to improve the mechanism by means of which information on the publishing of literary translation is collected and shared, in order to facilitate research and assessment of trends in the future.

Statistics derived from analysis of data provided by the British Library for three sample years — 2000, 2005 and 2008 — bring us the first ever accurate figures regarding the publishing of translated literature in the British Isles.

These figures reveal a steady growth of translated titles, showing that published translations stood at:

• 1,721 in 2000, with 529 titles representing translated poetry, fiction and drama;
• 2,014 in 2005 with 605 titles representing translated poetry, fiction and drama;
• 2,207 in 2008 with 753 titles representing translated poetry, fiction and drama.

This corresponds with the following percentages: approximately 2.5% of all publications and 4.5% of fiction, poetry, drama (literature) are translations.

The full report is available to download at http://lafpublications.org