Other Translation Awards and Fellowships

After yesterday’s post about the Susan Sontag Translation Prize, a reader contacted us about other translation funding opportunities with upcoming deadlines, namely the NEA Translation Fellowships and the PEN Translation Fund Award.

We do try and write these up every year, but as someone familiar with how easy it is to totally blow a deadline, it’s not a bad idea to post things like this on a regular basis . . .

Applications for the NEA Translation Fellowship are due on January 7th, 2010, and since you have to submit this via Grants.gov (which is better than it was a few years ago, but still a clunky pain in everyone’s collective ass) it’s not a bad idea to get started early. Pretty common application components: CV, statement about the project, sample translation, copy of the original, etc. And the fellowship are for either $12,500 or $25,000, making this a very worthwhile opportunity. (Or in business school speak—the grant application process is properly incentivized.) Click the link above for all the necessary details.

PEN awards a number of $2-$3,000 Translation Fund Grants every year to interesting projects. And in addition to the cash, they also do a brilliant job of promoting the winners, helping them to find a publisher. Their deadline is January 14th, 2010, and although this isn’t quite as baroque a process as the NEA application, it still requires the translator to get together a decent amount of material, so it’s not a bad idea to start the process as early as possible. Again, click above for all the necessary info.