The Translators Association (TA) represents literary translators in the United Kingdom. It is part of the Society of Authors (SoA) and is affiliated with the International Federation of Translators (FIT).
The Translators Association (TA) was established in 1958 as a specialist group within the Society of Authors, the UK trade union for professional writers, with a membership of more than 12,000. [1] The TA provides professional advice, representing individual translators and acting as an advocate for the profession as a whole.
The TA administers prizes for published translations of full-length works of literary merit and general interest from the following languages into English: Arabic, Dutch or Flemish, French, German, modern Greek, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swedish. [2]
The TA is run by a committee of ten elected members. [3] The current committee members are Vineet Lal and Ian Giles (co-chairs), Rosie Hedger, Anju Okhandiar, Clare Richards, Isabel del Rio, Nicola Smalley, Fiona Sze-Lorrain, as well as Shaun Whiteside and Roland Glasser (both ex-officio). [4]
Previous committee members include Anthea Bell, Peter Bush, Robert Chandler, Charlotte Collins, Howard Curtis, Rebecca DeWald, Kari Dickson, Marta Dziurosz, William Gregory, Daniel Hahn, Rosalind Harvey, Nicky Harman, Sawad Hussain, Natasha Lehrer, Antonia Lloyd-Jones, Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp, Christina MacSweeney, Ruth Martin, Samantha Schnee, Ros Schwartz, Jamie Lee Searle, Trista Selous, Deborah Smith, Ruth Urborn, Helen Wang.
Translators Association - A special series curated by Charlotte Collins to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the TA. [5]
Translators on the Cover - An open letter issued by the Society of Authors in September 2021, and signed by authors and translators, to campaign for translators' names to be included on the cover of the works they translate (#TranslatorsOnTheCover in social media).
The American Translators Association (ATA) is the largest professional association of translators and interpreters in the United States with nearly 8,500 members in more than 100 countries.
The Society of Authors (SoA) is a United Kingdom trade union for professional writers, illustrators and literary translators, founded in 1884 to protect the rights and further the interests of authors. In 2020 membership stood at over 12,000. The SoA is a member of the European Writers' Council.
Alaa Al Aswany is an Egyptian writer, novelist, and a founding member of the political movement Kefaya.
The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize (1990–2015) was a British literary award. It was inaugurated by British newspaper The Independent to honour contemporary fiction in translation in the United Kingdom. The award was first launched in 1990 and ran for five years before falling into abeyance. It was revived in 2001 with the financial support of Arts Council England. Beginning in 2011 the administration of the prize was taken over by BookTrust, but retaining the "Independent" in the name. In 2015, the award was disbanded in a "reconfiguration" in which it was merged with the Man Booker International Prize.
Anthea Bell was an English translator of literary works, including children's literature, from French, German and Danish. These include The Castle by Franz Kafka, Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald, the Inkworld trilogy by Cornelia Funke and the French Asterix comics with co-translator Derek Hockridge.
Qustandi Shomali (Arabic: قسطندي شوملي, is a Palestinian professor of history at Bethlehem University.
Dimosthenis Kourtovik is a Greek writer, literary critic and anthropologist. He studied biology in Athens and West Germany and specialized later on physical anthropology. In 1986 he obtained a doctoral degree from the University of Wroclaw, Poland, with a thesis on the evolution of human sexuality.
Núria Añó is a Catalan writer and a translator. Añó has exhibited her work in universities and institutions giving papers on literary creation or authors like Elfriede Jelinek, Patricia Highsmith, Salka Viertel, Franz Werfel, Karen Blixen or Alexandre Dumas, fils, as well as giving talks in libraries and secondary and higher education centres. She is also a member of several international artistic juries.
Jenny Erpenbeck is a German writer and opera director. She won the 2015 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for The End of Days and the 2024 International Booker Prize for Kairos.
Shaun Whiteside is a Northern Irish translator of French, Dutch, German, and Italian literature. He has translated many novels, including Manituana and Altai by Wu Ming, The Weekend by Bernhard Schlink, Serotonin by Michel Houellebecq, and Magdalene the Sinner by Lilian Faschinger, which won him the Schlegel-Tieck Prize for German Translation in 1997. Since May 2021, he has served as the president of the European Council of Literary Translators' Associations.
Dr Francis R. Jones is a poetry translator and Reader in Translation Studies at Newcastle University. He is currently Head of the Translating and Interpreting Section of the School of Modern Languages at Newcastle. He works largely from Dutch and Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian, though also from German, Hungarian, Russian, and Caribbean creoles.
Assaf Gavron is an Israeli writer, novelist, translator and musician, formerly a journalist and hi-tech worker. His books have been translated to several languages and won awards such as the Bernstein Prize for The Hilltop (2013), Prix Courrier International (France) for Croc Attack (2012), "Ein Buch für die Stadt" for the same novel (2012), and the Israeli Prime Minister Award for authors (2011).
The TA First Translation Prize was established by Daniel Hahn in 2017 and is awarded annually to for a debut literary translation, to be shared equally between the first-time translator and their editor.
Charlotte Collins is a British literary translator of contemporary literature and drama from German.
Hamad Bin Khalifa University Press is a publishing house based in Doha, Qatar. The press was initially managed by Bloomsbury Publishing PLC and was founded as Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Publishing (BQFP) in 2008 until its transition into HBKU Press in 2015. HBKU Press is part of Hamad Bin Khalifa University which is under the wider community of Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development. It publishes titles that serve both an international audience as well as the larger Arab community publishing fiction, non-fiction, young adult and children's literature, and academic titles. They highlight local Middle Eastern and Qatari narratives and also translate books from other foreign languages into Arabic.
Rebecca Ruth Gould is a writer, translator, and Distinguished Professor, Comparative Poetics & Global Politics at SOAS University of London. Her interests range across the Caucasus, Comparative Literature, Islam, Islamic Law, Islamic Studies, Persian literature, poetry, and poetics. Her PhD dissertation focused on Persian prison poetry, and was published in revised form as The Persian Prison Poem: Sovereignty and the Political Imagination (2021). Her articles and translations have received awards from English PEN, the International Society for Intellectual History’s Charles Schmitt Prize, the Modern Language Association’s Florence Howe Award for Feminist Scholarship, and the British Association for American Studies’ Arthur Miller Centre Essay Prize. Gould's work also deals with legal theory and the theory of racism, and she is a critic of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's Working Definition of Antisemitism.