Thursday 10 July 2008

Watch Out for 18 New Translations

The first round of grants have been awarded as part of a programme to fund translations of academic texts from German to English. The idea, according to the press release, is to help publicise humanities research taking place in Germany and to preserve German as a language for academic publication.

So you can look forward to reading titles such as Lady of the Hill. The Life of Cosima Wagner, Encyclopedia of World War I, or Rechtsbildung im wirtschaftlichen 'Weltverkehr' - Das Erdbeben von San Francisco und die internationale Standardisierung von Vertragsbedingungen (1871-1914) - which I'm just not going to translate, OK?

Interestingly enough, I notice that one of the "independent judges" was Detlef Felken, editor at the revered publishing house C.H. Beck. And if you look at the list of titles awarded translation grants, you'll see that four of them came from under that very roof. Ein Schelm, wer Böses denkt. Only a relatively small number of books were submitted, so let's hope more German publishers catch on to this fund in the future.

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