Translators Association

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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).

Contents

History

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]

Committee

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.

Activities

Translators Association - A special series curated by Charlotte Collins to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the TA. [5]

Recent campaigns

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).

Administered prizes

Related Research Articles

The American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) is an organization in the United States dedicated to literary translation. ALTA promotes literary translation through its annual conference, which draws hundreds of translators and literary professionals from around the world; the National Translation Awards in Poetry and Prose, an annual $5,000 prize for the best book-length translation into English of poetry and prose; the Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize, which awards $6,000 each year for the best book-length translation of an Asian work into English; the Italian Prose in Translation Award (IPTA), which awards $5,000 each year for the best book-length translation of a work of Italian prose into English; and the ALTA Travel Fellowships, which are $1,000 prizes awarded annually to 4-6 emerging translators for travel to the annual conference. Starting in 2016, in addition to the ALTA Travel Fellowships, one fellowship, the Peter K. Jansen Memorial Fellowship, is awarded to an emerging translator of color or translator from a stateless or diaspora language.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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 has become an influential critic of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's Working Definition of Antisemitism.

References

  1. Anderson, Porter (4 October 2023). "UK's Society of Authors' CEO Nicola Solomon is Retiring". Publishing Perspectives. Retrieved 19 December 2023.
  2. "Translation Prizes". Society of Authors. Retrieved 19 December 2023.
  3. "TA Committee Society of Authors" . Retrieved 19 December 2023.
  4. "Society of Authors TA Committee" . Retrieved 19 December 2023.
  5. "60 years of literary translation". 15 April 2018.