NIF Translation Fellowships: Bridging Language Barriers in Round 2
Pune, 21st September 2023: The New India Foundation (NIF) has proudly announced the commencement of applications for the second round of NIF Translation Fellowships, slated for award in 2024. This remarkable initiative aims to invigorate the translation of significant non-fiction works from Indian languages into English, thereby unveiling the rich tapestry of India’s history encapsulated within its diverse linguistic and literary traditions.
The inaugural round of Fellowships, earmarked for translations from Bangla, Kannada, and Marathi, is well on its way to publication by 2025. These three pivotal translations will complement the 32 books previously published under the New India Foundation’s flagship Book Fellowship program. The overarching goal of the Translation Fellowships is to advance NIF’s mission of fostering research and writing on all facets of Independent India.
Translators are cordially invited to submit proposals for ten Indian languages: Assamese, Bangla, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Marathi, Malayalam, Odia, Tamil, and Urdu. Each language category is overseen by an Expert from the Language Expert Committee, comprising distinguished Indian authors and scholars, ensuring rigorous standards of selection and support. Fellowship recipients will be chosen based on their choice of text, translation quality, and overall project proposal. The source text, a non-fiction work from any of the ten languages, can span genres, provided it sheds light on any socio-economic or cultural aspect of Indian history from 1850 onwards. For the Translation Fellowship, NIF is expanding its mission to encompass a broadly defined modern India, post-1947.
Each Fellowship, spanning a duration of six months, will grant a stipend of 6 lakhs to the recipient, enabling translators and writers to transform historical Indian-language texts into English publications. The Fellows are expected to publish their translated works by the end of the year, bringing their winning proposals to fruition.
Manish Sabharwal, Managing Trustee of the New India Foundation, expressed, “The Translation Fellowships aspire to make Indian knowledge, nestled within Indian languages, accessible to broader audiences by rendering them in English. Our diverse bhashas hold rich intellectual traditions that deserve wider recognition, and this initiative embodies our commitment to that cause.”
The application window for these prestigious fellowships opens on September 20th, 2023, and the deadline for submissions is December 31, 2023. The Jury for this year’s fellowships includes NIF Trustees such as political scientist Niraja Jayal Gopal, historian Srinath Raghavan, and entrepreneur Manish Sabharwal, alongside the Language Expert Committee in all ten languages, featuring esteemed bilingual scholars, professors, academics, and literary translators.
