Norway is launching a new translation price that is one of the most highly endowed of its kind in Europe, in an attempt to boost a “partly invisible” and often poorly paid profession increasingly under threat from machine translation.
Named after the Norwegian novelist and playwright who won the 2023 Nobel prize in literature, Jon Fosse, the Fosse prize for translators will reward one author every year with 500,000 NOK (£36,000) for making “a particularly significant contribution to translating Norwegian literature into another language”.
Funded by the Norwegian government and managed by the National Library in Oslo, the prize is exclusive to those translating from Bokmål and Nynorsk, the two official written standards of the Norwegian language.
“For a small language like Norwegian, the work of dedicated translators are crucial,” said Aslak Sira Myhre, director of the National Library of Norway. “It is a strenuous, creative and partly invisible work that brings literature to people and cultures closer together.”
This year’s inaugural prize is being awarded to one of Fosse’s longstanding translators into German, Hinrich Schmidt-Henkel, though the organisers clarified that translating the author’s work was not a prerequisite for eligibility.
“The award feels like a kind of Nobel prize for translators, thanks to the attention it brings to our contributions to world literature,” Schmidt-Henkel said.
In addition to the translation prize, Oslo is setting up an annual Fosse lecture, the first of which will be held at the Norwegian capital’s Royal Palace next April by French philosopher and theologian Jean-Luc Marion, a former of student of Jacques Derrida and one of the “immortals” of the Académie Française.
The new translation prize comes in the wake of a prolonged buzz around literary exports from a country that is home to a only 5.5 million people, but boasts not just Nobel winner Fosse but also autofiction trendsetters such as Karl Ove Knausgård, Vigdis Hjorth and Linn Ullmann.
The prize money makes it one of the most lucrative translation awards in Europe, second only to the annual 50,000 euro Martinus Nijhoff translation prize that has been handed out every year by the Netherlands’ Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds since the 1950s.
Most translation prizes in the Anglosphere, such as the PEN America Translation prize or the Society of Author’s TA First Translation prize, typically award its winner a sum of about £3,000.
The most recent working conditions survey by the European Council of Literary Translators’ Associations (CEATL), found that experienced full-time translators rarely make a living from literary translation. A 2022 report by the Authors’ Guild of America had 63.5% of translators reporting an annual income of less than $10,000 from literary translation.
Earlier this month, the Netherlands’ largest publisher, Veen Bosch & Keuning (VBK) announced that it would be using AI to assist in the translation of a limited number of commercial fiction titles, sparking further concerns about future pay conditions for human translators.
