The USA’s National Translation Awards have six shortlisted titles in prose and poetry each. Winners are to be announced on October 26.

Another Book Contest Looks for Performance

Since our September announcement of the longlisted titles in the American Literary Translators Association‘s 2024 National Translation Awards, we’ve been pleased to hear from Rachael Daum, the communications and awards manager with the United States’ National Translation Awards, that she’s keen to begin providing input from these “ALTA”-winning titles about their performance in the marketplace after a win from ALTA’s highly regarded honor.

As it happens, today (October 10), there’s similar shortlist anticipation from another prominent book award, the United Kingdom’s Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction, where executive director Toby Mundy, intends to research and report—on his own choice of timing and criteria after his awards—the impact of a Baillie Gifford Prize win.

In the aggregate, efforts of these kinds—to discern and evaluate the marketplce effects of a prize win—can establish some parameters of expecatation and actual influence, leading, presumably, to more clear-eyed enthusiasm—an honest appraisal of the impact of a “golden sticker” on a book cover, in terms of how much awards actually count.

And with ALTA’s focus on translation, particularly in the United States, it could be instructive to know if and how much an award might influence marketplace perceptions of translated work. The value of translation in literature has never been self-evident to broad swaths of many populations, and having actual numbers on how much an award might impact print-runs, unit sales, and so on, could be invaluable.

Source: https://publishingperspectives.com/

Full article: https://publishingperspectives.com/2024/10/translation-alta-announces-its-2024-shortlists-in-prose-and-poetry/