Michael Henry Heim Collegial Translation Prize: deadline 1 September 2016

This looks like a very interesting initiative. The Michael Henry Heim Prize is offered for the best translation of a journal article by a scholar from a relevant discipline, from an Eastern European language into English. The prize is worth $500 and publication of the translation in the journal East European Politics and Societies. The deadline is 1 September 2016.

The prize came into being because in the Guidelines for the Translation of Social Science Texts, which he compiled with Andrzej Tymowski, Heim

encouraged scholars to translate their colleagues' work to make it more widely available. Although Heim was a renowned literary translator, he was convinced that the best translator of a scholarly text is a colleague in a relevant discipline who has acquired facility in translation, rather than a professional translator who is linguistically skilled but unfamiliar with the discipline's concepts, contexts, and controversies.

The Heim Prize flyer can be downloaded here.

The Guidelines for the Translation of Social Science Texts, as well as translations of it into Arabic, Chinese, French, Japanese, Russian, Spanish and Vietnamese, can be found at www.acls.org/programs/sstp.

For more writing on translation by Michael Henry Heim see this 2012 interview,  this article in the Yearbook of General and Comparative Literature (paywalled) and the MLA's very useful peer review guidelines on 'Evaluating Translations as Scholarship'.

For more on the problematic status of translation in the academy see this article in the US Chronicle of Higher Education (another version downloadable as a pdf here).