Michael Henry Heim Collegial Translation Prize: deadline 1 September 2016

This looks like a very interesting initiative. The Michael Henry Heim Prize is offered for the best translation of a journal article by a scholar from a relevant discipline, from an Eastern European language into English. The prize is worth $500 and publication of the translation in the journal East European Politics and Societies. The deadline is 1 September 2016.

The prize came into being because in the Guidelines for the Translation of Social Science Texts, which he compiled with Andrzej Tymowski, Heim

encouraged scholars to translate their colleagues' work to make it more widely available. Although Heim was a renowned literary translator, he was convinced that the best translator of a scholarly text is a colleague in a relevant discipline who has acquired facility in translation, rather than a professional translator who is linguistically skilled but unfamiliar with the discipline's concepts, contexts, and controversies.

The Heim Prize flyer can be downloaded here.

The Guidelines for the Translation of Social Science Texts, as well as translations of it into Arabic, Chinese, French, Japanese, Russian, Spanish and Vietnamese, can be found at www.acls.org/programs/sstp.

For more writing on translation by Michael Henry Heim see this 2012 interview,  this article in the Yearbook of General and Comparative Literature (paywalled) and the MLA's very useful peer review guidelines on 'Evaluating Translations as Scholarship'.

For more on the problematic status of translation in the academy see this article in the US Chronicle of Higher Education (another version downloadable as a pdf here).

Initiatives in scholarly translation

I've just been reading a series of articles from a special issue of Art in Translation (volume 4, issue 1, from 2012, paywalled) on the translation of art history. The journal is the only periodical I know whose main function is to publish and discuss research in translation. There's a fascinating piece, 'Honor Thine Author' by Fiona Elliott, about being a translator of art-related texts and what that actually means. She has some very interesting reflections on ambiguity, author sensitivities and the ethical stance of the translator. On a light-hearted note, I like her remark that

if I get the chance, I always make sure I ask authors to avoid using the word 'aufheben', and any words deriving from it. What English verb could match 'aufheben', meaning to pick something up from the floor, to save something up for later, to close a meeting, to terminate a siege, to remove restrictions, to cancel or annul, to repeal or revoke, to compensate, neutralize, offset, or elevate?

More seriously, it's great to see the arts and humanities gradually get more interested in the role of translation in the transmission of research findings. There's a long history of debates about translation in the history of ideas, of course, about translation of Freud, Derrida, de Beauvoir, Cixous, Barthes, about the problems of translating philosophy in general (for readers with a JSTOR subscription I recommend this article by Jonathan Rée), or the 'epistemicide' wreaked on ideas by scholarly translators, as per Karen Bennett's argument.

But what I really wanted to write about today is practical initiatives to support scholarly translation in the arts and humanities.

Namely:

The Getty-funded Art in Translation has a standing call for suggestions of important work in art history which deserves to be translated into English. They also have an annual student prize with a first prize of £250 for the best proposal by a registered art history student (next deadline 1 November 2013).

The Organisation of American Historians (OAH) offers a biennial prize, the David Thelen Award, to the author of the best article on American history published in a foreign language. The winning article is published in English translation in the Journal of American History. Next deadline 1 May 2015 for articles published in 2013 or 2014.

The European Society for Translation Studies has a new grant, the Translation Prize, which offers up to €2000 to support the translation of a key text or texts in Translation Studies. It was awarded in 2013 for the first time, for the translation of Anton Popovič's Teória umeleckého prekladu [Theory of Literary Translation] from Slovak to English. The next deadline is 1 June 2014.

On a related note, I see that the long-running Polish literary translation journal Przekładaniec has made several recent issues available in English on its website. I didn't know that there was a lively debate about the translation of Derrida's term différance into Polish, but I do now. 

The Society for Cinema and Media Studies has a Translation Committee which has a brief to promote the translation of scholarship in film and media studies not written in English. I have a memory of a page on their old website with a collection of texts proposed for translation, which was a very nice idea, but I don't seem to see it on the new website.

Lastly, there was an initiative a few years ago by the American Council of Learned Societies, part-funded by the Ford Foundation, to produce guidelines for translators in the social sciences. It culminated in Michael Henry Heim and Andrzej Tymowski's 2006 Guidelines for the Translation of Social Science Texts, which can be downloaded in English, Arabic, Chinese, French, Japanese, Russian, Spanish and Vietnamese here.

UPDATE 28 December 2013: I've just been reminded of the wonderful-looking Paul Celan Fellowships, 3-6-month funded residencies for translators of works of criticism and research publications from and into Eastern European languages. The website gives the following description of the programme:

The aim of the Paul Celan Fellowship Program is to overcome deficits and asymmetries in the exchange of ideas and the reception of scholarly literature which result from the division of Europe in the 20th century. Therefore, the program supports translations of canonical texts and contemporary key works in the humanities, social sciences and cultural studies from Eastern to Western, Western to Eastern, or between two Eastern European languages. Special emphasis is put on translations of relevant works written by East European authors and/or by female scholars.

I'd be very interested to hear from readers of more initiatives to promote and support scholarly translation.

UPDATE 26 January 2015: I've just read an excellent short report on a French government-funded project commissioned by the Institut Français and run by Gisèle Sapiro on the translation of French research in social sciences and humanities. The project makes a number of recommendations and it will be very interesting to see how many of them will be taken up. More on the project here (in French).

European Society for Translation Studies Translation Prize

The EST Translation Prize, of 2000 euros, is awarded annually for the most deserving project to translate key texts in Translation Studies (including research on interpreting and localization).

Deadline: June 1, 2013

Rules and Conditions

1. The prize shall be used to assist with the translation, editing and/or publication of a book or group of articles in any of the sub-fields of Translation Studies.
2. The prize may be paid to a translator, group of translators, or academic publisher or journal.
3. The translation may be from any language and into any language.
4. The translation shall not have been published prior to the awarding of the prize (six weeks after the application deadline), since the purpose of the prize is to promote translations that would otherwise not lead to publication.
5. The translation shall be published within two years of the awarding of the grant.
6. All publications and promotional materials associated with the translation shall bear the mention “With the support of the European Society for Translation Studies”.
7. Applications will be evaluated on the basis of: a) potential impact of the project on international Translation Studies, b) feasibility of the project, c) pertinent experience of the translator or translators.

For further details including instructions for applicants, see the relevant page on the EST website. 

Sibley Translation Prize (JP-EN)

Readers translating out of Japanese may be interested in the new Sibley Translation Prize. I was particularly interested to see that this includes the translation of literary scholarship as well as literary texts (see a previous post on translating research):

To honor their late colleague William F. Sibley, The Department of East Asian Languages & Civilizations and the Committee on Japanese Studies of the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Chicago have established the William F. Sibley Memorial Translation Prize in Japanese Literature and Literary Studies. The competition will be held annually and judged by members of the Committee on Japanese Studies.

In keeping with William Sibley’s lifelong devotion to translation and to the place of literature in the classroom, up to three awards of $2500 each will be given for the translation from Japanese into English of a work of fiction, poetry, or drama (including screenplays), or scholarship in literary studies, broadly understood. To encourage classroom use and comparative research, winning entries will be published on the Center for East Asian Studies website (http://ceas.uchicago.edu).

Submissions should be on the scale of short story rather than novel, on the one hand, but a body of poetry rather than single poems, on the other. Essays, reportage, and criticism are all genres for consideration. Retranslations of works previously translated, especially of premodern literature, may also be submitted. Translations of manga and anime will not be accepted, but scholarly essays about these genres will be considered. Translations of subtitles, no; scenarios, yes. Co-translations are acceptable.

The deadline for the first competition is December 1, 2010. For more information see the CEAS website.

Scholarly translation and the enhancement of the humanities

Having recently been involved in the editing of a trilingual collection of essays on translation, I have been thinking about translation and its role in the internationalisation of disciplines. Researchers don't generally have budgets for translation, so if you don't speak a particular language, and a monograph or article has been written on that language in one of your research specialisms, then tough luck. This is a problem that was recently flagged up by the British Academy, which is, understandably, concerned that UK research will become insular as generations of researchers with limited foreign language skills set the agenda for what research should be doing. According to the British Academy's Language Matters position paper,  another likely outcome is that international research will be carried out by researchers from elsewhere, who can offer the language skills UK graduates are short of. This affects the employability and competitiveness of UK researchers.

Let's hope that more can be done to enhance the language skills of British researchers in all disciplines. Meanwhile, since researchers can't speak all languages, translation also has a role to play. Abstracts in lingua francas like English and French, already standard in many journals, help to indicate whether an article might be worth translating. Machine translation is unlikely to produce usable results, but the possibility of running an electronic copy of a publication through machine translation software to discover whether it is worth finding funding to get it translated, or worth commissioning a translation of it for a journal, is attractive.

I was interested to come across several different approaches to this problem recently. The Handbook of Translation Studies published by John Benjamins invites translations of its content, which should be submitted to the editors. Translations in Arabic, Chinese, French, Japanese, German, Portuguese, and Spanish of English language originals already uploaded online can be submitted for consideration and, upon acceptance, may be added to the online edition.

The Translation Committee of the SCMS (Society for Cinema and Media Studies) instituted a Translation Gallery of film and media publications which SCMS members would like to see translated (the page seems to have disappeared in the recent revamp of the SCMS site but I'll post it if and when it reappears). 

The OAH (Organisation of American Historians) funds the David Thelen Award each year for articles published in the field in a language other than English. The prize-winning article is then translated and published in The Journal of American History. This seems a really good initiative, and one that could usefully be taken up by other scholarly associations as well. (It's just a pity that the published translation seem to be have been translated by magic - no translators are named, and no reference seems to be made in the journal to the translated status of the articles).

The European Society for Translation Studies (EST) has recently been discussing a grant initiative to promote translation within TS, and we'd be interested to hear comments on this too.