 Good morning, everyone. Thanks for coming to the panel. Cash and Prizes grants and awards contribute to a sustainable US literary culture. Can all of you hear me? I asked about getting mics for the room, but they can't do that. So you're all sitting in front. That's good. So just to remind you about what we wanted to talk about in this panel, the blurb for it was the Penn America Literary Awards, the Penn Heim Translation Fund, the Alta Translation Awards, Prize and Treble Fellowships, the Best Translated Book Award, the NEA Literature Fellowships and Artworks Grants. Besides rewarding and bestowing recognition on individual translators for excellence and achievement, how do these honors help support the healthy literary ecosystem that is essential for us to continue translating and publishing literary translations in the United States? Or do they? Are they sufficient? Do they work the way they should? How do they compare to analogous programs in other countries that fell through because we didn't get anybody from other countries to come? And do we need more of them? No, not on the panel. But in the discussion, that's true. Danny, can you just take my place? I'm not going to introduce the panelists because they're listed in the program, and people can introduce themselves as they go along. I'm Alex Zooker. I co-chair the Penn America Translation Committee along with Margaret Carson, and we're going to be starting the discussion today by looking at the Penn Heim Translation Fund. But just to make sure, if you came here learning to learn about how to apply for grants and awards, they're definitely in the wrong place. And if you get up and leave, that's OK. So if you get there, Danny, what's on the panel? Here's your chance. Wait, I'm the wrong one. There have been panels like that in the past, so I just want to make sure. So as I said, I want to talk about whether the grants and awards that we have, or the major ones at least, are doing what we think they should to support what I'd like to call a sustainable culture, which is to say balanced and diverse. And in some ways, I consider this a continuation of the conversation that we started with Margaret Carson and Alta Price's panel at Penn World Voices Festival in May, who we talk about Translation, Women's Voices, in which they looked at data for just one year, since expanded to five, on the publication of female authors in English translation. Today, what I'm going to be talking about is language diversity in the grants that the Penn Heim Translation Fund gives. And of course, these are data that can be analyzed for all sorts of aspects. We could do it for women too, and maybe in a future panel we will. But today, I'm going to be focusing on language diversity. And people who know me well know that I'd like to come up with ideas that sound really good at first, but don't necessarily actually work when you put them into practice. So one of the things you'll learn today is why nobody pays me to analyze data. But the idea I'd like to introduce is that of an ecosystem. And I love this work because it makes me think of slides like this that we looked at when we were kids in school. And one definition of an ecosystem that I found was, according to Wikipedia, an ecosystem is a community of living organisms in conjunction with the non-living components of their environment. Things like air, water, and mineral soil interacting as a system. I also would like you to contemplate who in our ecosystem is the snapping turtle. Oh, that's a snap. Yeah. That would be the conclusion. What is the air? What is the water? What is the soil? Anyway, I decided it wasn't my best interest to go full hog into the analogy. But the idea is to think about what we're doing as part of a system. Here's another definition of an ecosystem from a site called desertscape.com, since we are in the desert. Ecologists use the term ecosystem to indicate a natural unit of living and non-living parts that interact to produce a stable system in which the exchange of materials between living and non-living parts follows a circular path. An ecosystem may be as large as the ocean or a forest or one of the cycles of the elements, or it may be as small as an aquarium jar containing tropical fish, green plants, and snails. To qualify as an ecosystem, the unit must be a stable system in which the exchange of materials follows a circular path. So, again, I may have been getting a little carried away when I use the word ecosystem, and I'm not sure if we can define a circular path for what we do. Money certainly does go around. But you can, yeah, I've used it before. Okay, so we'll talk more about that as we go. But the main thing I was trying to get at is this as critical as it is for us as individual translators to focus on our needs, how much money we're paid, whether or not we hold a copyright on our works, whether we're named and reviews of our works, and all that, it's also important to acknowledge that we operate as part of the system, and that our continued survival depends on the system's health and sustainability. And this has become especially clear to me in the past year and a half that I've been serving as co-chair with Margaret, the translation committee, and getting a bigger picture of the system that we operate in. So as I said, I'm gonna focus today on diversity specifically language, diversity using the data from the Panheim Translation Fund. I've asked some of the other panelists to consider how their grants or awards contribute to sustainable literary culture. And again, and not to slight this, we know that these grants and awards help individual translators by raising their profile, encouraging them to keep doing what they're doing, rewarding them with money and prestige, and these are absolutely no small things. But I would also like everybody here to think about how they do or don't help in terms of, for instance, boosting sales, increasing reviews, or any other way that you can think of the system that we operate in. So the reason I wanna concentrate on language diversity is because we so often talk about how translation is a bridge between societies and cultures, helps readers empathize with the other, it broadens our horizons, et cetera, et cetera, but what is actually being translated? How many works in translation come from cultures little known to readers in the United States? How many of them come from cultures we're actually already familiar with? Here's an example of this. Last March in New York, there was a one-day conference titled Publishing Spanish Writers in English. At one point in the day, someone pointed out that for most, or maybe at least many English-speaking readers, French literature is barely even perceived as foreign anymore, in the sense that you don't have to explain to somebody why it's important to translate French literature. Anybody who goes to school in the U.S. has read French literature at some point in their lives, most likely. In university courses, many French classics are read alongside English-language classics without any comment on the fact that they're translations. And this is obviously not true. Most literature is but an example, which I hope will be relevant in thinking about how, to what extent are we looking at a diverse system and whatnot? So, a little background on the creation of the fund. You could read it, but it's now a little bit over 10 years old. There you see the initial amount of money that was given, Michael Henry Heim. Donated it anonymously. After his passing, it was made public and the fund was renamed with his name in it. So there you see how many languages have gotten grants over the years. And one of the things that the Heim fund really is designed to do and prides itself on is having the projects be published. And this goes back to the criteria. The agreement between Michael Henry Heim and the Pan-American Center in 2003 said, the threshold criteria for grant awards are the quality of the original work and the quality of the translation. Awards will be based further upon the nature of the project and the number of proposals worthy of funding in the year submitted. So that's a relatively bare bones set of criteria and we'll hear from Moe about the criteria that the NEA uses for their grants, which are a little different. In 2007, so after a few years, that was expanded a little to give a clear purpose for the fund. So the later criteria say, the criteria for the final selection are the quality of the translation and the quality and interest of the original text. Preference is given to the projects that stand to benefit the most from the visibility that the award will give them. The specific factors that might be taken to consideration, thus include, but are not limited to colon and author or work that is relatively unknown to American readers who deserves a larger audience, a younger translator whose work is felt to be deserving of encouragement and recognition, the lack of funding from other sources for the project, the lack of a publisher for a project despite its literary merits. So you see with these new criteria, there's an acknowledgement that it is meant to support translators themselves. We're talking about translators earlier in their career. Works that are relatively unknown might not be able to find funding from other sources and also publishers. So it's really kind of addressing more the system of literary translation or literary culture than just the works themselves and the quality of the translation. So since I'm going first, I don't wanna draw too many conclusions, but with this bare bones kind of, oh, and also note that on the panel that selects the grants, it's translators, editors, and publishers. So it's not just translators assessing the grant applications. So I'm gonna look at data for the grants from the past five years, 2011 to 2015. The Penn American Center does have data for the earlier years, but the only parts of it that are available in electronic form are the actual grant winners and which have been published, but not the submissions. So that would take longer to go back and dig through their file. So I'm not gonna talk about those today. But at this point, I also wanna thank Ariel Anema who's a literary awards coordinator at the Penn American Center who gave me this data. Esther Allen who was the chair of the translation committee when Heim set up the fund and Michael Moore who currently serves as chair of the Funds Advisory Board that selects the grant winners each year. So here's a list of the submissions by language for the last five years. I've got a graph that'll show this in different form, but you can see already, I guess, or at least at this point I've come to expect which is French, Spanish, and German dominate and more generally European languages do. Although you'll see Spanish is a European language, but a lot of the applications are coming from countries that are in the global South, South America or even Central America. So they're not actually European. And we can come back to this if anybody wants. So that's by language. Here's a different representation of it that makes it a little clear the dominance. I don't even have my glasses on, but that was a mistake. So this is, you can see again, fewer than 10 submissions. So we've got incredible diversity of applications. I'm gonna move a little closer so I can see too. Yeah, and you probably can't even read all the things, but I have a spreadsheet there. If anybody's interested in having more information about the data afterwards, of course, you can ask me. And then when we go to the ones that have more than 10 submissions, so Arabic, Czech, German, Italian, Portuguese from Brazil, Turkish, Catalan, Danish, Hebrew, Japanese, Russian, Chinese, French, Hungarian, Polish and Spanish. Here are the grants by language for the past five years. So look at Chinese here, more than French. Here I've broken down the Spanish by country. So look at Argentina. They are definitely head and shoulders above the other Spanish languages. Here's Spanish, Spain, Spanish, Chile, El Salvador, Exito, Puerto Rico. This was actually a Puerto Rican author living in the United States. So that could be classified two different ways. Yeah, here we've got Portuguese from Brazil, Portuguese from Mozambique, Portuguese from Portugal has gotten grants, but not the last five years. So here what I was talking about region, since we're concerned with diversity, Europe is obviously getting the vast majority of the grants. Here we're looking at publications, so the blue is the grants and the red is the publications. So one of the things that I thought was really interesting is that Spanish, again, not this aggregated but all the Spanish language applications, there have been 15 grants given to Spanish language projects in the last five years, but just five of them have actually gotten publishers. Chinese has gotten 14 grants, six, I'm sorry, should be 14, it looks like there is 12. Four or five of them have publishers, again I have the spreadsheet. French does much better. Spanish actually has the worst record in terms of the proportion of the grants that have been published. Czech for instance, which is the language that I translate, five grants, all five of them have been published. Now one thing to keep in mind too though is that some of the, although the fund is designed to help projects get publishers, some of the applications do come in already with the publisher attached to them. So again, publications by region, so here you see that actually Asian language has been really well, much better compared to some of the other regions when it comes to publication. So here we can think about, what do publishers want to put out? Do the grants that we give correspond to what publishers are looking to publish? And again, I'm not saying it could be more complex than that, but I think it's at least worth thinking about. So that's it for my introductory remarks and I'll turn it over now to Moe Sherif from the National Down with the Arts. So thank you guys so much. I'll thank you so much for allowing me to be part of this discussion. I've only been managing the translation publisher for the NEA for about a year and a half. So what I sort of bring to the table is retrospective on the fellowship and what I've heard from many of those who championed this whole initiative before and then what I wanted to do being here, hearing you guys, hearing about the ecosystem and seeing how we can better the program to serve the field. So I have a bunch of figures as well. Yeah, I could. So the last time I was in UMA, it's kind of interesting. It's not interesting being in this position, being here talking to you guys. The last time I was here, I was in UMA Arizona training to go to Iraq. So I was doing like convoy patrols and doing all this crazy stuff. So this is definitely a different role and definitely an active translation of life, I guess. So I'll just leave some figures on the translation publisher itself. So starting in 1981, David Wilk is sort of the champion guy for this at the NEA. But definitely Cliff Becker was the one who sort of made it what it is now over the years. And so since 1981, the NEA has awarded 410 fellowships to three translators with translation books and 56 languages and 77 countries. Just wanted just to get you to see that in our artworks category, we also fund publishers and presenting organizations just like all the time. So last year, this year, 2015, the NEA spent about $450,000 just on publishers and presenting grants. So you can see exactly where we're spending the money most. This slide allows you to see, a lot of you guys don't get to see the background. You see the announcement that we put out in FY16 for our fellows, but you don't get to see the background of what we receive and how it all breaks down. So we received, the next slide I'm gonna go to is gonna show you how the application we received is about a year. But this gives you just a snapshot of what last year was for us. So we received 91 eligible applications and we ended up funding 20 of those, which works out to be about 20%. In the past couple of years, it's stayed pretty consistent with this 20, or 22, 20% of projects funded given the amount of applications we received. So we spent about $275,000. I believe our budget for translation is $300,000 and so there are things in the background to kind of go over the projects and what we get from panelists to figure out how much we're gonna apply on what amounts. So the next thing you see is that the breaks out to 18 grants were funded at $12,502 at $25,000. And then because we're a federal agency, we're concerned about reaching every states. And I think in the conversation of the numbers, I think that NEA has been more concerned with showing that we're reaching a diverse pool in the nation. And we use our numbers in that respect as opposed to we have these numbers, we have this data and we wanna use it to leverage something else for the field. So we kind of just use it to say we're reaching everyone in the U.S. as a national platform. And so we reached small states in the applicant or in the grantee pool and the projects represented 17 countries in 11 languages. And then we broke it down a little further where there were 10 collections of poetry in the mix and 10 of prose. So this is a wider snapshot. So I was asking me to go back 10 years and so you can see that in 2005, 2002, and there's this huge influx that goes up to 164. The reason for that, I think in the background, Cliff and Amy were sort of in conversation about how to better serve the field. Our guidelines used to have to establish eligibility. You have to have 48 pages of translations to be able to apply. We changed that to 20 pages to bring in new translators and those trying to assert a feel a little bit more. And we also changed the wait period between grants. So if you got a grant, you have to wait 10 years before you can reapply. And so we brought that down to five. And also increased the amount of grants you could receive from two to three. So here's a snapshot of just the majority of our grantees are first-time recipients. So 11% are two-time recipients and 1% three-time recipients. I think that 3% is because people don't know that they can apply for a third time or they're even saving up for that third time. I don't know. One thing to note about the 88%, we do a service to the field where we give feedback on applications. So a lot of those people in that 88% have applied more than once, called back for feedback on an application, changed what the panelists have to say as a reader and then went reapplying and ended up getting a grant. So this is sort of like what Alex presented. Just a snapshot of our entire, of the lives we receive grants in the most, applications in the most, of course, Spanish at the top, with 117 applicants we received in the last 10 years, French, Italian, and German. You see the percentage of products that actually get awarded in that time and they're pretty even, the ratio is pretty even, depending on the amount of applications we receive to the amount of grants we've awarded throughout. And just like outside, we haven't broken it down to see what countries get grants at what percentage, but Alex sort of touched on that a little bit. And this is the smaller languages, things a little bit more able, but you can see the amount of applications to the grants over 10 years. I think it's kind of, it's interesting to note that, he wrote about 12 applications that we've received in that one award. I don't know, like Alex said, I don't know what this data is saying, but just kind of just see it. I guess I can touch on our review criteria here. So with the process for us, let's have a different way of educating these applications. We use a two-tier system, artistic excellence and artistic merit. Artistic excellence speaks to the quality of the translation itself, and the merit speaks to whether or not this original author's been translated before, whether the translator seems like they can actually carry out the breath of the project in collaboration with or by themselves, whether there's an audience for it. And we have a two-tier process where expert readers who are both translators of the language and the genre review it and give that as a sort of guidance for the panelists to use, and then the panelists review it again. So this is a breakdown of the languages. Alex said we end up funding more European languages. I don't have the numbers for this, but you can see since the whole graph of the whole program, you use it a language in a sort of, in a country that represents the languages. I'll just look at that for a little bit. Let me come back to all the stuff later on, I'm sure. So this is our big money slide. Basically, I guess the answer to the question whether or not these fellowships or awards are actually helping translators. These are pretty impressive. So we had never looked for this data before until we had this profit, which is really good now, because now we're going back to try to find more of this information. And these numbers only represent what we could really find and say, there's the publisher, this is the work, and this is what came with it, right? A lot of times we could find announcements for a book to be released, but then we couldn't find anything else after that. So we didn't include that in this chart. So this is just what we could find. And so you see it's pretty, you know, 90%, 92% going to find publishers, 71%. The numbers as we get closer to more recent grants are going down because there's time needed to go ahead and find publishers. So we asked for testimonials for some of our recent grantees from FY16, and there's kind of Samo who was just awarded an FY16 publisher. And he says on the very first day of the news was announced, I was contacted by three publishers requesting to see some of their work. They're promoting some of his work for 10 years now, and I can honestly say that's the first time that this ever happened. And he goes on to say that he's pretty much confident that he'll find a publisher for his work. And in other words, some of it is working now. And then that's possible. And I think what we do in the ecosystem is put that promotion out there. It's a big deal to have any of the fellowship, but I think publishers now are paying attention to the project that these transition are working on because they haven't any standpoint. Cool. Thank you, Moe. Next. Okay, Erica, that's all right. So I don't have a slideshow for you. We did. Yeah, okay, got it. It wasn't a requirement. It wasn't a requirement. And actually, I don't have quite as much data. So I might be a little bit quicker, but I do want to say just generally that Alta is now in the position to really start gathering data seriously and systematically as we give out these things. And so I'm sort of taking notes and listening for questions that we might like answered in the future next year or year after that. But as many of you probably know, Alta transitioned from its former institutional home at the University of Texas Dallas about two years ago to becoming an independent arts nonprofit, which is currently what we're doing. And I don't have access to the data from before the transition. So what I have is 2013 through 2015 data. And the prizes we, I'm looking primarily at the National Translation Award, which is the larger profile prize. It was founded in 1998. Again, I don't actually have much information on how it was originally founded, but though it's possible other people here know something about that. So it's sort of shrouded in mystery as in as a lot of the early days of Alta tend to be. But it is a $5,000 prize to an already published book. So we're coming in sort of at the end of the process where Chad is coming in also after perhaps a grant has been given for the translation of the process. A publisher has been found and then the publisher, generally the publisher, sometimes the translator in special exceptional cases, submit it to us for the National Translation Award. Which as I hope many of you heard this year is starting to be awarded in two categories, prose and poetry. So that is another complication on the data. I have numbers for submissions across genres. So I'm just gonna say some numbers quickly and then I'm happy to say them again more slowly if anybody actually wants them. So in 2013 we had 76 submissions across all genres. So there was no genre separation. So in that year we had 45 in fiction, 27 in poetry, three in nonfiction and one in drama. In 99% of the, we ask that it be the publisher submits at any occasional and exceptional circumstances. Translators will say, I can't get a hold of my publisher. They don't have the funds to submit and I'd like to pay the fee on their behalf. So it's very few cases and we make exceptions for those cases because of course we want as many books considered as possible. And the fee is $30 for presses that publish 10 or fewer titles a year and $60 for presses that publish 10, 11 or more titles a year per submission. And that's something that is, I think differentiates our prize from all of the other prizes that are being talked about is that we do have a fee for submissions for this prize. Margaret's gonna in her presentation compare the awards. Yeah, we'll talk about that in a little bit. Yeah, so where was I? I was in 2013 which is as far back in time as I can go. It's a long time ago. It always feels like a long time ago. Out of the 76 submissions we had, we had 25 languages represented and German was the biggest with, no, sorry, Spanish, yeah, right. Spanish was the biggest with 17, unsurprisingly, German comes in second with eight, French at seven, Arabic also at seven and Chinese at four, Russian at five, Chinese at four. So, and then we've got a bunch of sort of one, two, we have one Macedonian submission, one Serbian, one Slovenian, one Tigrinia, I was actually, when I was doing this, it was a language I hadn't heard of before, so I'm sure I'm saying it wrong, but I was really delighted that I had learned of a new language. And so that's 2013. 2014 we had 86 submissions, 42 in fiction, 28 in poetry, seven non-fiction, four drama and five that were unindicated or unidentified and that may be because they were multi-genre, hybrid, difficult to pin down and or the publisher didn't know what to tell us. And of those 86 submissions, within those we had 26 languages represented, Spanish again, top at 21, French with 16, Italian with eight, Russian had six, German had seven. So it's a similar breakdown and again, a couple of smaller, less represented, we had one Urdu submission, one Galicia, Galician submission. Yes, I'm sure somebody here knows how to say that. So there's always sort of an interesting, small number of marginal or less widely spoken languages represented. And this year in 2015, I actually don't have the language data for this year. I was trying to get it together before this panel occurred, but it wasn't data that we collected because our submission process changed. And I'm gonna say a little bit about that before I talk about the data that I do have for this year. So up until this year, the submission process required that every book be reviewed by an expert reader, somebody who could read the original source text and the translation and make a recommendation for whether or not it should be considered in the second round. So the first round, you imagine, we have 25 languages with 86 submissions, that's 86 different expert readers that we need to find, including an Urdu expert reader or a, it was very complicated to manage and to administrate that part of it. And as part of our transition to independence, we knew that we needed to reduce the administrative costs of running that kind of award. And so we reversed the rounds. And so starting this year and moving forward, we have three judges in each genre, fiction and poetry, and we define those loosely to accommodate for hybrid works and works of drama that are either in prose or verse go into their respective prose or poetry categories. So we have three judges in each category reading just the English. They put together the long list. The long list titles go to the expert readers in with the original source language. Those reader reports come back to the judges and from that they pick a short list and a winner. So that we still feel that that gives us that part of the mission of the NTA is to evaluate the quality of the translation that is part of what we're doing and looking for. And so we thought that that gave us the best chance of still doing that and keeping it a manageable award. So this year with the two with a new process and the two genres, we had 110 submissions, which is really exciting. So that means, and I'm not a data analyst, but in my mind that means separating them actually was a good idea that it gives publishers more of an incentive to submit in each award. We are now giving more publicity to titles instead of having just one winner, we have two. So all of that is sort of attracting people to the award in a meaningful way, I think. We had 110 submissions, 39 in poetry and 71 in prose. And so that's up from 28 in poetry from the year before and 42 in fiction. And I'm not sort of tabulating in the nonfiction and the drama there because I don't know, sometimes they could be one or the other. And as I said, I don't have the language data yet for this year. It's something that I'm gonna be putting together but I have to actually go back and do the research. I don't have any gender data and I'm realizing that I wanna start collecting that. So I'm sort of making notes about what data we can be collecting moving forward. The goal with the NTA is to increase, one thing that we think about when we're evaluating the success of the program is how do we measure our success? And I think you guys, it was great to measure the success by which projects get published. That's a really exciting metric. And for us, it's how many books get sold and or read which is a little bit harder for us to measure. We don't really know how to measure that yet. But hopefully we'll start figuring it out and working with distributors and booksellers and maybe gathering them. So who are your judges? Who are the judges up? So it used to be, before we rewrote the policies last year, the judges had to be translated. No, actually, I don't think we really had any, it was whoever we invited to serve, whoever the board invited to serve as judges. And the rules were, the process was rewritten and now it has to be two translators and a third person who is somebody in the industry. So we've had editors, we've had publishers. This year, we had all translators in poetry. It was Steven Kessler, Diana Thau and Lisa Rose Bradford. Last year, we had two publishers. We had Elaine Katzenberger and Barbara Appler along with, it's on the website. But so the demographic has changed to emphasize translators but to also include other people in industry from this year forward. Jessica Cohen, thanks. She's a great translator from Andrew. She's one of the 12. Yeah, she's the one, she's a project that got published probably. So, and I'd be happy to answer other questions. That's all the data that I have available but if there are particular questions I can sort of research while Chad is talking and try to answer them or take notes later. That's great. I mean, I think one of the purposes of this is to decide which data we do wanna track and maybe agree on some of those things, so. Wonderful, thank you. All right, thanks. So now we're going to have, because Margaret's gonna be comparing the awards to each other, we're gonna have Chad go next. Yeah, I'll talk a bit about the best terms I book word and then try and open up some questions and then you can present your thing and then maybe go back to that. The best terms I book word, which I just looked up on Wikipedia because I never remember anything. I had our Wikipedia. I know, it's the easiest way, because I don't know. I don't know. It seems like it started a million years ago, but we started it in 2008. Oh, 2008. 2008 was the first year that the award was given out but it was four books that were published in 2007 and this started out of the idea that there are prizes such as the National Book Critics Circle Prize for Fiction Criticism, Bagby, all the different categories. They have six different categories for the NVCC but there's not one for translation and the NTA had existed, but at that point in time it was pretty... Under the radar. Under the radar, yeah. It was not widely publicized and what we wanted to do, what I wanted to do was to have a prize for translation as like the best book that had come out that past year that was translated and it wouldn't be specifically like, this is the focusing like the NTA does on like the comparison of the original to the translation, but rather to like be a marketing device that this would be, here's a great book in translation. We've been collecting from that year onwards at 3% at Open Letter. We run something called the translation database that keeps track of every book that comes out for the first time ever and a fiction and poetry in translation in the United States and we have data on like who the translator was. Now we have data on whether the author is male or female, if the translator is male or female, what month it was published, who the publisher was, what the language was, what the original country that the author is from is. So we have all this data there that we report every so often and upload to the website which you can all access easily at 3%. But even looking at that and we've been writing a lot of stuff for the 3% blog about how there aren't enough books that are being published in translation that there needs to be more of this and so forth. And one of the problems that I saw was like even though the numbers seem horrible, like at that point in time, there's 342 I think it is or 346 books that have come out in translation in 2007. That seems like a really, really small number and yet the people that are reading books read probably like four of those 346. Like and if you look at 300 books, like how many books do any of us read in a year? Like 50, 60, maybe? If you're really like devoted to reading and if you're to look at a list, why are you gonna choose one book over the other? So one of the mechanism that would like somehow highlight here are the best. So let's narrow this down a little bit instead of giving you like here's 500 books that came out last year, go forth and read translations. You're like here are 25 books that are worth paying attention to or that if you're just going to pick one, here's a good list. So when the word started it was initially like we had picked a panel of like various people who were like like Scott Esposito that's very like schooled and like reading, literature and translation. Brian and Kennedy who was a bookseller, people like that. And over the years that's evolved to the point where now there's two major differences. Three actually. One is that we split it apart too into poetry and fiction because it was impossible to put the two together and to have anyone like poetry was never, it felt like it was getting short changed in a lot of ways. Cause it just wouldn't, like it was harder to judge, it was harder to like deal with. So we separated those two and created two different panels. So the panelists for poetry or poetry experts, panelists for fiction or tend to be fiction experts. The other thing is in 2010 here at Alta, Amazon announced that they would be funding the prize at a level of $25,000. So $20,000 of that goes to the award winner. So each translator receives $5,000 and each of the authors receives $5,000. And then the last $5,000 goes to the panelists and it split up among all of them. In terms of, and then the third thing that we did that I think is important that ties into what you're saying about ecosystem and things that you guys are talking about too was that we broke down the panelists. So for fiction there are nine judges. Three of them are translators, three of them are critics and three of them are booksellers. And the point of the whole thing was to get to focus on the part of the ecosystem that's not, the books already exist. We don't need to like get the translation to a publisher. What we need is people to read these books so that then the publishers are encouraged to continue publishing them. So it was always designed to try and create a readership and that by having booksellers involved and having people who are the reviewers involved, there's a much greater chance that these people are talking about these books or like get them. We have bookstore displays at various bookstores throughout the country. Even started like last year, like one bookstore can win be like the official BTBA bookstore for the next year by doing displays and sending in information. And that this year is like December is 57th Street in Chicago, but it was designed to try and help that promotion part of it. More so than anything else. There's something else I was gonna say with that. And I can remember so like a lot of the judging like the metrics would be on the sales which are really hard to figure out. Like it's almost impossible to figure out whether or not a book is sold because of the award. Especially like if we had ever won, if Open Letter had ever won, I'd have real data. We have not so like the data that we have is like anecdotal. But like Anna Rosenwang, who a lot of you know won in for poetry this past year for this book diorama that was published by Phony Media and they sold out of it and reprinted it with a BTBA winner logo on it. And we have had a lot of coverage at any time that the award's announced. Halel Attali at the Associated Press writes an article for the long list for the short list and helps get like some information out there. And the other thing that we started trying to address the like marketing side of this was that every week throughout the year a judge from the award, either poetry or prose writes a post about books that they're reading. So we tried throughout the, so there's at least 52 posts throughout the year that are highlighting books that are being considered for the award. In terms of like what's considered, we have no entry fees. The same as like the National Book Critics Circle is our model. Anything that's published is eligible automatically. The judges are like finding the best books. We're encouraged all the publishers to mail in everything so that they see it and can read it. But if someone doesn't mail something in and a judge has read it, it still qualifies. Like it's fine. They don't have to submit it in that sense. But it was all designed to try and be more promotional for the books, which is where your ecosystem thing ties together. I think that the readership creates a demand like this leads to the author being a snapping turtle who then eats the translator. We were like, ah. Yeah, that's the thing. Because the author needs to have some motivation. They need to eat food. They're hungry. Yeah, where's the review? The books are the end, I think. They're the ones that will actually map out the flowchart. Yeah, we don't have, I didn't do any of the sets on the language because what we, or any of those things, because every book is eligible. So I have, if you just go to the 3% translation database, you can see that. And it's the same, it basically mirrors what everyone else said. It's always French, German, Spanish, are the three top languages. Then it shifts every year between like different Scandinavian languages, especially when there's like a big crime wave or like Chinese or like, or sometimes it'll be like Arabic will shoot up and be like that's the number three language. And the reason is because the American School of Cairo produced like 12 books that year. So suddenly like that's like, but all the numbers are always super depressing because like after like, the number of languages that have more than 10 books that are published in translation in America, it's like eight. So like once you get down below that, it's basically everyone's got like three, four, two, one. And it's sort of sad to look at. But the one thing that's encouraging, I think, I don't know if this is for the award, but like the thing that's encouraging is that over the course of the past, however many years it's been now, eight years, I guess, the number of publishers that have published books in translation has increased dramatically from like 110 initially to about 150 now. So like that's significant, that people are at least publishing things. We get contacted constantly by like small presses I've never heard of that know that the award exists and want their book to be considered for the award, which I think is important. One of the things that to open this, well, I'll wait, I'll wait, I'll let you talk about it all. Can I ask a question? Yeah. And so you started to touch on this a little bit, but you said you get contacted by small presses that you don't even know exist. And so there's a huge part of the ecosystem that like doesn't print books with ISBNs, doesn't have a distributor, what about those books? Okay, the way that we distinguish, and this is part of what I think you're gonna say too, is that if your book is not available to a store to be bought, we don't, it does not get included in the database. So if you have an ISBN or you're in, even if you don't have an ISBN, but you're in WorldCat and like available outside of Amazon, fine. That's totally fine. It's just literally if like, cause we don't want it to be, if a book wins and a book seller's like, I'm gonna sell this, but I can't buy it. Like I don't know how to, there's no way to get this. That defeats the whole purpose. So the one qualification is that the book is available in some means that people can purchase it. Otherwise it's outside the ecosystem. Otherwise it's outside the ecosystem. It's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, inter-matter. Inter-matter, yeah. Okay, yeah. So I am interested first in looking at literary prizes in a larger way, in the larger picture. And I think it's really wonderful that we can put this presentation within the context of last night's award ceremony, because that is sort of the culmination of when you talk about literary prizes. That's the culmination of all the work, all the thinking, all the logic. What do we want to accomplish with this prize? I also am kind of thinking of maybe looking at literary prizes in a more theoretical way. Like I want to consider the questions, the reasons, the impact beyond the yearly event, beyond the yearly cycle that we three are talking about with our literary prizes. I want to consider what's the function of a literary award, oh, and picking up on Alex's really happy literary, what's the function of this prize within the literary ecosystem, within the whole publishing scene, and within the literary marketplace. And why does the literary world want or need literary prizes? There seems to be a demand for them. They happen, and there are new ones coming around all the time. What calls them into existence? And I think, Chad, you were answering that with the BTBA, where that began. Duty awards compete against each other in a good way, hopefully. And why is a gap scene in the existing awards and thus prompting new awards? What would a history of literary awards look like? And it would be interesting to consider the lifespan of a literary award, because there have been many, particularly coming, knowing a little bit about the history of Penn. I know that Penn started in 1922. There have been tons of literary awards. Not all of them are still around. So what's going on with that? What keeps them going? What brings them to an end? And now, thanks to Alex, I'd like to think about recycling them. So yeah, okay, just get the circular path going. I think it's also, would be good to reflect on the long list, the short list, what's the function of these in terms of the literary prize? And this is also, I know with the BTBA, that that's something that was copied, I think. You're doing it, and okay, and a couple of years ago, Penn started doing the long list in the short list. And I think they're much more now attuned to the marketing and the value of it, and not just the prestige value. I also want, you would like to consider the ceremony, and just thinking of last night's ceremony in the ritual, the presentation, the buildup, the winner going to the podium, speaking, and the acknowledgement, and it's like, that's all part of this process. And then all the attendant publicity, and this morning I woke up to lots of emails of the press release from the NTA awards, and I think that's all part of it. So getting back to the question of procedure, I think that's the first thing that most people think about with the function of literary prizes, and it is, it's a recognition from judges who, well, depending on the prizes, NTA and Penn, it's your peers, it's your translation peers, your translator peers. To the individual who's awarded, you get the distinction on your CV, on your bio, it's on the blurbs, on your future translations. And it's also, I think, an honor and distinction to the award giver, to the organization that has put the prize together. It's, now, this question, when prize-winning translations are publicized, is that influenced readers? These are things, these are metrics. How do we get at this information? Do readers seek out prize-winning translations? We hope so, and that's why the stickers go on the books, and there's publicity. Does the prize or award really enhance the status of the author, the translator, and to what degree? How does that last, that aura, how will that last? Does it inspire others to translate? Okay, so that's my speculative part of the presentation. Now I wanna look more specifically at the Penn prizes, and Penn, as I just mentioned, it goes back a long time, started in 1922. The Penn translation prize, we have two main translation prizes, there's a separate prize for poetry. Also, there was a split at some point. So the Penn translation prize is on our description of the prizes, formerly called the Penn Book of the Month Award. And this started in 1963. And that's also very interesting. Thinking what calls a prize into existence, and I haven't done the research in the archive to look at the correspondence in minutes, but I think this is a post-Sputnik kind of idea, that the US has to open up to other countries. So I think that's maybe. So this honor was founded in 1963 through the efforts of the Penn Transition Committee, and was the first American award to honor the art of the literary translator. Okay, so we have two things there. This is the first, and also it's honoring the art of the literary translator. So the translator is really at the heart of this award. That is the whole criteria, that's all the guidelines that this description gives us. So it's pretty much up to the judges, and the judges up to now have all been, I believe, translators, how they're going to interpret what kind of criteria they're going to. It's always a problem when you're judging a translation. It's a matter of the original work, and then the work of the translator, and how do you sort of apportion that and deciding on a winner, or do you? Okay, and then the Penn Award for Poetry and Translation, it was started in the mid-90s, and I think for the same reason, you can't really combine them together effectively. Okay, impact on sales. Now I do have a report from Scott Esposito, because our winner last year was Baboon by Naya Marie Ait, and published by Two Lines Press. And so I asked him specifically, and he wouldn't share sales information with me, but he did say that it was that award, the Penn Transition Award for Baboon was definitely one of a number of factors that kept that book in the public eye, and selling more than a year after its original release. Okay, so without putting a number on, he said, yes, it did have an effect. He also mentioned, and there are many other awards out there now, he mentioned the Firecracker Award. This was the first time I heard the Firecracker Award. Have you heard this? Yes, I think it got renamed too. It used to exist in one way, and then it came back last year. Yeah, so the first time it's been back was last year. And one of their translations was also honored. And that also helped, he says, it helped the sale. So that's some evidence. Okay, now I just, so let's look at this spreadsheet. I sent around a questionnaire to Erica and Chad. Just, oh, yes, oh, sorry, sorry. Okay, great. I mean, there's, again, there's a lot of data here to save, but I think it'd be interesting here, just if you wanted the categories here in terms of the differences and overlaps and similarities, how the prize is described. I think this is an important moment for whoever is discerning the prize to sort of define it and set sort of parameters and values and state it right there. And probably a lot went into crafting, I know the NTA was, you know, very. A whole committee. A whole committee, right, working.