ATA/AFTI Student Translation Award

The recipient of the 2023 ATA/AFTI Student Translation Award is Yevheniia Dubrova, a student from Dartmouth College who undertook the translation of Bohdana Matiyash’s poetry collection, Your Beloved Dogs and Other Animals, from Ukrainian into English. Matiyash is the author of five collections of poems in Ukrainian, none of which have been previously translated into English in their entirety.

In her application, the translator notes, “Things that keep Ukrainian people going are hope, faith, nature, our beloved pets, and the people that we love, and Bohdana’s poetry is able to be the message of hope and light that shines through even in the midst of terrible darkness.”

The jury found the translation to be a pleasure to read, and were excited to see young talent. She was particularly successful in conveying the pacing and ambiguous sense of the original, despite the dramatically different grammatical structures of Ukrainian and English.

Yevheniia Dubrova is a writer and literary translator from Donetsk, Ukraine. She is currently pursuing an undergraduate degree in English & Creative Writing at Dartmouth College. Yevheniia writes fiction and nonfiction set in her home country and in the United States, where she found herself five years ago, and translates prose and poetry from Ukrainian.

Sam Hankins is the winner of the 2022 ATA/AFTI Student Translation Award for the translation of an excerpt from “Lunar Syzygies and Quadratures,” an 18th-century short story believed to be the first Hispanic-American work of science fiction. One reviewer noted, “When comparing the target and source texts, I was impressed by the candidate’s solutions for archaic terminology and odd spellings employed in the source text. Moreover, this is a wildly ambitious project in terms of the research undertaken and the competing considerations the translator must confront.”

Sam notes: “Lunar Syzygies and Quadratures is one of those weird stories you get when someone writes science fiction before there was a term for that or rules for doing so. It’s got space travel, Greek mythology, historical references, demons dragging a guy into the sun, and, of course, painstakingly detailed science and math because technobabble hadn’t been invented yet.”

“It’s tough to translate—not just the real words, but the made-up words that have just enough Greek influence that you can’t treat them as nonsense. And as for anachronisms, it turns out that ‘Earthling’ is fair game in 1776, but ‘test tube’ somehow isn’t.”

“It’s a fun story to translate, and it’s also tremendously important from a cultural standpoint. It’s probably the first work of sci-fi written in the Americas, and it’s also 40 years older than any sci-fi written in English. This is a story that needs to be on the table when we talk about the birth of science fiction, and I hope my translation can bring some awareness to it.”

Devin Gilbert is the recipient of the 2018 ATA/AFTI Student Translation Award for his translation project from Angolan Portuguese into English of Ondjaki’s collection of short stories Os da minha rua (The People On My Street) . Devin received his MA in interpreting and translation studies from Wake Forest University in 2018. He is currently a doctoral fellow in translation studies at Kent State University.

Ondjaki is the pen name of Ndalu de Almeida, an Angolan writer who makes his home in Rio de Janeiro. Critics have called him one of the most important writers in the history of African literature. Ondjaki’s diverse bibliography includes novels, children’s books, poetry collections, and short story anthologies, plus additional credits in writing for film, television, and theater. Inspired by the works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Jean-Paul Sartre, his works include the novels AvóDezanove e o segredo do sovietico (Granma Nineteen and the Soviet’s Secret), Quantas madrugadas tem a noite (How Many Dawns Has the Night), and Bom dia camaradas (Good Morning Comrades). Ondjaki has received numerous awards, including the Jose Saramago Prize and Grinzane for Africa Prize.

Os da minha rua is a collection of shan stories that presents the setting of the author’s own childhood, a microcosm of Angola’s capital city, Luanda. On one hand, Ondjaki presents the life of children, which is very similar throughout different cultures. On the other hand, he invites readers to learn about Angola, which has been molded by colonization, the fight for independence, innuences from Cuba and the USSR, civil war, poverty, and the misery of the Angolan people. The book has not yet been translated into English.

To translate Ondjaki’s collection of short stories, Devin designed an applied translation model (Oscillation Model) to help him distinguish what aspects of the source text were cultural, what aspects were more linguistic, and what aspects pertained to literary stylistics. With regards to the translation of cultural elements, this model helped him recognize when to highlight features of Angolan culture that would be foreign to U.S. readers (foreignization) and when it was more preferable to move these cultural elements closer to the culture of the target audience (domestication). Some of the challenges Devin encountered as he prepared a translation for English-speaking readers in the U.S. included ensuring contextual understanding and appropriate transfer of Angolan Portuguese that is innuenced by native languages.

Diego Burgos, an associate professor of Spanish and translation at WFU, directed the project together with Henryk Slusarczyk, a Divine Word missionary from the Polish province of St Joseph. Slusarczyk, who spent over a decade as a missionary in Angola, was able to provide cultural and linguistic background for the translation of the novel.

Christina L. Lowry is the recipient of the 2013 ATA/AFTI Student Translation Award for her translation project from German into English of the 1992 German musical Elisabeth, written by Michael Kunze and Sylvester Levay. Lowry is a senior at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia.

Empress Elisabeth of Austria is well-known in Germany and Austria as a beloved folk hero. A trio of semi-biographical films in the 1950s starring Romy Schneider immortalized the Hapsburg empress, affectionately known as “Sissi,” as a romantic f.allytale princess. While the popular films tell the story of an independent young girl thrown into the world of politics by her marriage to Emperor Franz Josef I, the reallife Elisabeth’s transition to court life was far more difficult. With no privacy, an overbearing mother-in-law, and tensions with her husband, Elisabeth eventually withdrew from court life, traveling restlessly until she was assassinated at the age of 60.

Kunze’s and Levay’s musical Elisabeth portrays this much darker version of Elisabeth’s life. Christina began translating Elisabeth during her junior year at Washington and Lee University as an independent honors project for her German major. She says that ”the complexities of translating the lyrics of an almost entirely sung musical, with their poetry and rhythms, has been by far the most challenging aspect.” Christina hopes to publish the translation and eventually see it performed in English.

Eyal Sherf is the recipient of the 2012 ATA/AFTI Student Translation Award for his translation project from Arabic into English of an excerpt from Alawiya Sobh’s novel, Its Called Love. Eyal recently earned a certificate in Arabic>English translation from New York University.

Its Called Love follows the fortunes of a number of characters in Beirut society, whose experiences reflect the tragedy and destruction of the Lebanese people, from the civil war to foreign invasion and the events leading up to the July 2006 war. It is a novel that speaks about human suffering and the extreme experiences of love and fear in a world constantly overshadowed by violence.

Alawiya Sobh is a Lebanese journalist and novelist born in Beirut in 1955. She has bachelor’s degrees in both Arabic and English literature from the Lebanese National University in Beirut. She has worked in journalism since the early 1980s, writing for a number of newspapers and magazines. In the 1990s, she founded Snob Al-Hasnaa, the best-selling women’s cultural magazine in the Arab world today, and remains its editor-in-chief. Her books include The Sleep of Days, Dunya, and Maryam of the Stories. Its Called Love, her fourth book, was nominated for the 2010 Arabic Booker Prize. Sobh’s works

have been banned in all Arab countries.

Eyal Sherf is an Arabic and Hebrew translation specialist and principal at Sherf Translations, based in New York. A runner-up at Toastmasters International’s humorous speech contest, he is also a communication consultant and an accent reduction specialist at Elson Global Speech in New York. He has worked in governmental institutions and the defense field as a translator, Arabic curriculum designer, and instructor. His translation specialties include the commercial, legal, medical, and political fields, as well as the performing arts. In addition to his certificate in translation, he has a master’s degree in vocal performance/musical theater, also from New York University, and a bachelor’s degree in acting from the Birmingham School of Speech and Drama, in England.

Clinton Pechacek and Heather Outland, both students at Baylor University, are the co-recipients of the 2008 ATA/AFTI Student Translation Award, for their translation project from Latin into English of a section of Gratian’s Decretum. Gratian, a 12th-century canon lawyer from Bologna, Italy, is considered by many to be the father of canon law. His Decretum had a major impact on the legal and political traditions of the West, becoming the central text of ecclesiastical law. The section of the text Pechacek and Outland are translating, “Causa 23,” represents Gratian’s sustained analysis of the ethics of war. The students are working under the direction of Professor David Corey.

Other applications for this award were received from Brigham Young University, Kent State University, Florida State University, and The University of Chicago.

Alexis Crowell, a student at the College of Wooster in Wooster, Ohio, is the recipient of the ATA Student Translation Award, in the amount of $1,000, for her translation project from Russian into English of The Obstacle: Selected Works of Daniil Ivanovich Kharms. Daniil Kharms, a writer in the Soviet Union from the mid 1920s to the early 1940s, was particularly noted as a master of absurdism and of the short story. Ms. Crowell spent her junior year abroad in Saint Petersburg, Russia, where she took classes and learned a great deal about Daniil Kharms, who was a native of Saint Petersburg. She continued her research on Daniil Kharms upon her return to the College of Wooster.

Other applications for this award were received from the College of Wooster, the University of Texas at Austin, Kent State University, the University of California Los Angeles, and Barnard College, Columbia University.

Jennifer Grotz, a PhD student at the University of Houston, is the recipient of the 2003 ATA/AFTI Student Translation Award.

Aaron Crippen, a student in English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Houston, is the recipient of the 2001 ATA/AFTI Student Translation Award for Chinese into English translation.

Jartu Gallashaw Toles is the recipient of the 1999 ATA/AFTI Student Translation Award for her translation of Ignacio del Moral’s Dark Man’s Gaze (La mirada del hombre oscuro) from Spanish into English. Ms. Toles is a student in Language Interpretation and Translation at Rutgers University, and was sponsored by Professor Phyllis Zatlin.

Sonya Emenco, a student in the Multicultural Communication Masters program at DePaul University is the recipient of the 1998 ATA/AFTI Student Translation Award.

Thomas G. Morgan is the recipient of the 1996 ATA/AFTI Student Translation Award.

Paula Haydar, the recipient of the 1994 ATA/AFTI Student Translation Award, is a student in the MFA in literary translation program at the University of Arkansas. She translated excerpts of Elias Khoury’s novel The Kingdom of Strangers (Mamlakat al-Guraba), from Arabic to English. The novel is a mosaic portrayal of its author’s native Lebanon besieged by civil war, and expands into a generalized examination of chaos and despair suffered by families everywhere.

Dana Loewy, a Ph.D. student at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, is the recipient of the 1992 ATA/AFTI Student Translation Award for her translation of Jaroslav Seifert’s On the Waves of TSF (Na vlnách TSF) from Czech into English.

Though a handful of individual poems by Jaroslav Seifert have been previously translated, Loewy’s is the first complete English translation. Seifert won the 1984 Nobel Prize for Literature and has been called “a living symbol of the continuity in modern Czech literature” by Václav Havel.

Lisa Sapinkopf is the recipient of the 1991 ATA/AFTI Student Translation Award.

Denise Guidotti is the recipient of the 1989 ATA/AFTI Student Translation Award.

John Berks, a doctoral student in comparative literature at Indiana University, is the recipient of the 1988 ATA/AFTI Student Translation Award.

Gabriela Mahn and David Vandenberg are the joint recipients of the 1986 ATA/AFTI Student Translation Award.

Susan Phillips and Stephanos Stephanides are the joint recipients of the 1985 ATA/AFTI Student Translation Award for their translation of Guyana Brittanica (1896) by Neves e Mello from Portuguese to English.