It’s amazing how quickly a year goes by. In April 2010 we were getting ready to launch the first ever Harvill Secker Young Translators’ Prize. We were feeling our way a bit: how many people would enter? What was the best way to spread the word? Would we be able to read all the submissions? (After all everyone was translating the same story.) Happily word got round and the 231 submissions were read without driving us to the brink of madness. Even better, our winner Beth Fowler has gone on to receive her first commission to translate a book for our friends at And Other Stories. (She has written a guest blog on Rebecca Carter’s A View from this Bridge site, which you can read here.)

So surely we know what we’re doing this year! Well, when I first came up with the idea of the prize I realised we needed to cover a range of languages. After all we publish literature from a number of different countries. But a new language every year means a new set of challenges every year. We don’t publish many books from Arabic at the moment, nor do many other publishers, despite the fact that it is spoken by more than 200 million people. Daniel Hahn of the British Centre for Literary Translation suggests that this is partly due to the relatively limited number of experienced Arabic to English translators, and the BCLT is trying to encourage more people to translate from this language. (This year they are including Arabic in their translation summer school). So Arabic is fairly new territory for us, and it’s tricky to know where to start. Fortunately Margaret Obank and Samuel Shimon at Banipal magazine have been incredibly generous with their time and advice. Samuel suggested that we use a story by a young Egyptian writer called Mansoura Ez Eldin as our translation challenge. I’m enjoying reading her novel Maryam’s Maze, published by the American University in Cairo Press.

We were thrilled to have our story confirmed, but it also brought up another new challenge. While I could limp through the Spanish text of Matías Néspolo’s short story ‘El hachazo’, I can’t read a word of Mansoura’s story ‘Layl Qouti’, and it wouldn’t be right to commission a translation to satisfy my curiosity. If I read a translation it might affect my decisions when it came to judging the prize later on. Along with my fellow judges Anthony Calderbank, Maya Jaggi and Penelope Lively, I need to approach the English translation just as any other reader would, asking myself over and over: is this beautifully expressed in English? Happily, translator Anthony Calderbank can vouch for accuracy against the original. While it is strange to have no sense of the story before we open the first envelopes at the end of July, it does make for an exciting surprise. 

To find out more about the Harvill Secker Young Translators’ Prize please click here.