Alicia Gordon Award for Word Artistry

Sue Burke is the recipient of the Alicia Gordon Award for Word Artistry in Translation for her translation into English of an excerpt from a text written in Spanish in 1688 by Joseph de la Vega about the stock market provided many challenges and satisfactions. The American Foundation for Translation and Interpretation offers this award to recognize imaginative solutions to knotty translation problems based on rigorous research.

The ATA Chronicle column can be read here.

Sara Nogueira Lago is the recipient of the Alicia Gordon Award for Word Artistry in Translation for her translation into Spanish of Willie Fitzgerald’s What’s Confusing, a short prose piece that appeared in the January 2015 issue of the Pacifica Literary Review, a small literary arts magazine based in Seattle, Washington. The American Foundation for Translation and Interpretation offers this award to recognize imaginative solutions to knotty translation problems based on rigorous research.

Willie Fitzgerald is the co-founder and creative director of APRIL, an annual festival of small and independent publishing. His writing has appeared in Hobart, Everyday Genius, Poor Claudia, City Arts Magazine, and the Pacifica Literary Review.

Sara is a literary translator who was born, raised, and educated in Galicia, Spain. She has always been passionate about both English and books, especially contemporary North American fiction. A former elementary school teacher, she currently works in New York City as a freelance English to Spanish translator. She has more than two years of experience, mostly in the health and cosmetics fields. She has a BA in English language and literature from the Universidade de Vigo, as well as a master’s in teaching qualification and teaching English as a foreign language from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra.

Gregary Racz is the recipient of the Alicia Gordon Award for Word Artistry in Translation for his Spanish-into-English translation of the poem “Alphabetical-Numerical Prophecy.” The American Foundation for Translation and Interpretation offers this award to recognize imaginative solutions to knotty translation problems based on rigorous research.

Racz is an associate professor of foreign languages and literature at Long Island University, Brooklyn. He is currently serving as vice-president of the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA), and is the review editor for ALTA’s journal, Translation Review. His many publications include over three hundred translations of Spanish-language poems in journals and anthologies, including The XUL Reader (Roof Books, 1997), José Lezama Lima: Selections (University of California Press, 2005), and The Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry (2009). He is currently at work on a monograph, Approaches to Translating Poetry, forthcoming from Multilingual Matters’s Topics in Translation series.

The Alicia Gordon Award for Word Artistry in Translation was presented to Grant Hamilton for his French-English translation of a television advertisement designed to encourage winter tourism in Quebec City. The American Foundation for Translation and Interpretation offers this award to recognize imaginative solutions to knotty translation problems based on rigorous research.

The ad was originally produced in French to entice French-speaking Montrealers to make the three-hour drive downriver. When the ad proved effective, the decision was made to adapt it into English to target the audience in Boston and the surrounding area. Amalgame, a Quebec City ad agency working on behalf of the Quebec City Tourism Bureau, contacted Grant to do the translation.

Grant explained the main challenges this project involved. “First, the words had to rhyme and had to fit the music. Second, the translation had to indicate from the outset that the city being portrayed was Quebec. The original French did not do this, because the city is instantly recognizable to a Montreal audience. This is not the case, however, for the English-speaking audience. The third challenge was that the French contained references to Île d’Orléans and la Grande Allée, two geographical reference points that are instantly identifiable to a Montreal audience. These, too, had to be changed in the English version to something more recognizable to an English-speaking audience. A few other shots in the ad were also changed, so I had to take this into account as well.”

Grant, a certified French-English translator (Ordre des traducteurs, terminologues et interprètes agréés du Québec), owns and manages Anglocom Inc., an agency specializing in business communications in English and French. He teaches French-English translation for marketing and advertising as part of the certificate program at New York University. He is the assistant administrator of ATA’s Translation Company Division, as well as a regular workshop presenter at ATA events. He is a graduate of Laval University.