Translation Awards Fund Raiser
Posted on December 1, 2010 Posted by John Scalzi 7 Comments
I promised Cheryl Morgan that I would write something about the newly-created The Science Fiction and Fantasy Translation Awards, which are for works of speculative fiction translated into English, and the fund raiser designed to promote them. But then, I thought, hey, why should I write something when I can just repost everything she’s written — like a retweet, only much much larger! So here, here’s Cheryl Morgan telling you about the Translation Awards:
Hello USA. Everyone recovered from their turkey-induced stupor yet?
As you almost certainly didn’t notice last week, being preoccupied with other things, I’d like to draw your attention to the fund raiser that we are running for the SF&F Translation Awards. There are a bunch of cool prizes available for some lucky donors, and since we started the thing I have had a few kind people contact me with offers of additional prizes. We’ll announce them in due course, once we are sure we won’t be paying out more in postage than we get in from donations.I shall probably be a bit boring about this over the next month or so, because I do want these awards to be prestigious and not just something that a bunch of nutty fans and academics care about. There are loads of fabulous authors in the non-English-speaking world, but we’ll only get translations published if we can get our own publishers away from thinking that no one will ever buy a translated novel, which sadly many of them do.
It would be great if I could tap into arts funding for this, but money for that has been horribly slashed in the UK recently. The EU has arts money available, but only for projects that are limited to EU countries. As our winners may come from Japan, or Brazil, or anywhere else outside Europe, we wouldn’t qualify. And of course it is always likely that any grant application would be turned down on the grounds that science fiction isn’t worth supporting. So it really is down to us. If you can’t afford to donate anything yourself, please at least blog about it to help spread the word.
Full details, including the current list of prizes, are available here.
If you want to see Cheryl’s original post (which is just like this one, only without me in it) it’s here.
I’ve always wondered why awards can’t be useful but nice things. Like special Sci-Fi Alpaca Sweaters. That way instead of being on a shelf it could be worn and cherished, literally warming the hearts of those who won the award.
Don’t you think the Emmys, Grammys, Tonys, etc. would be so much cooler if awards were more heart felt. The activists could get baby goats, rescued little puppies for cool actors, Tye died shirts and pants…endless possibilities!
Interesting idea. I wonder how they will pick which works from which countries will be translated.
Rob @2: According to the Awards Eligibility Page, “Works may be suggested for consideration by the Board, the Jury, the Advisory Group or any member of the public.” There’s much more than that, all under “Eligibility.”
Thank you John, much appreciated!
Kevin@3. Thanks.
In addition, my question would have been better expressed as: How visible are non-English authors to the English-speaking/reading SFF readership?
I’m all for being exposed to authors’ works from other countries, I hope the there will be a wide variety of countries represented.
Rob @5: The Awards are also actively soliciting Nominations through the web site. It is of course sometimes a challenge, as your question implies, but making it less of a challenge and making those authors more visible to English-speaking SFF readership is part of the goal of the Awards.
“thinking that no one will ever buy a translated novel, which sadly many of them do.”
Did Schätzing (The Swarm) and Lukyanenko (The Night Watch, etc) not sell? Or did they not count as authors in translation because their books sold well?