Translations between Central and Eastern European languages and Arabic

Next Page Foundation is pleased to announce a call for applications within its newly launched Encounters Program. The aim of the program is to to create conditions for a cultural dialogue beyond the traditional East/West dichotomy by encouraging translations in both directions between Arabic and the languages of Eastern Europe and the Balkans.

Publishers and cultural journals from the Arab region, and from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) are welcome to apply for co-funding for the publication of translation from Arabic into CEE languages or from these languages into Arabic.

Eligible countries:

  Albania, Bosna and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Ukraine

  All Arabic-speaking countries

Eligible are projects for translation and publication of individual titles, series of titles or series of journal publications. In terms of genre, applications are welcomed for quality contemporary fiction (post-1960), short stories, essays, biographies as well as texts in humanities and social sciences written by authors from the eligible countries.

Eligible organizations:

This call is open for publishers and cultural journals. For application from Arab publishers, a priority will be given to proposals for co-productions between two or more Arab publishers from different countries. Priority will also be given to organizations with a proven track in publishing quality translations. Longer-term projects with a coherent strategy will be given a priority over a one-off initiatives.

Grants are provided in USD and are intended to cover the investment risk related to publishing translations. They generally cover the copyright and translation fee and in exceptional cases – also part of the production costs. Publishers are expected to recoup their own investment from sales. Publishers will be entirely responsible for ensuring the translation rights on a given work, for the translation and editing, its publication as well for ensuring a proper marketing and distribution of the supported titles. Each publisher may apply with up to 5 titles.

Next Page reserves the right to commission an independent evaluation of the quality of translations for the supported titles before they are being published.

Next Page offers to interested publishers consultations on project preparation, titles choice, copyright holders and other related issues.

Application and selection procedure:

1. First step: Publishers from the eligible countries send a Letter of Intend in English language to Next Page containing the following information: name and contact of the applicant, information on their publishing activities to-date, full bibliographic information on the selected titles for application as well as a justification of the choice of these titles. The letter should also contain a preliminary estimation of the amount of grant to be requested.

Deadline for the letter of intend: 15 May 2009. Contact person: Ina Doublekova 2. Second step: Next Page makes a pre-selection based on the letters of intend and applicants are invited to submit a full proposal in a standard application form.

3. Third step: Final selection of successful candidates is made by Next Page who are offered a standard grant contract. Selected publishers will be expected to start implementing the projects immediately.

Non-eligible projects:
  poetry;
  retranslations of previously translated works;
  commercial titles;
  projects by publishers that have not fulfilled earlier contractual obligations with Next Page or other donors, or that have done so in a non-satisfactory manner

Contact person for this call: Ina Doublekova The Encounters program is made possible due to the support of the OSI MENA program.

The announcement in Arabic could be read here: