We are delighted to announce that at our last Board Meeting we added Nalo Hopkinson to the Board. Nalo was born in Jamaica, has lived in Canada, and now teaches in California. She is a past winner of a World Fantasy Award and a Locus Award, and has a long string of other award wins and nominations. More information about Nalo can be found at the SF Encyclopedia.

The Association for the Recognition of Excellence in SF & F Translation is seeking a number of volunteer staff to assist with the running of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Translation Awards. The positions are detailed below. Please email info [at] sfftawards [dot] org with details of your experience if you are interested in any of these posts.

Facilitator

This person will work with the awards jury to facilitate efficient discussion of eligible works. Duties will include assisting with the recruitment of jurors, obtaining copies of eligible works for the jury, facilitating jury discussions, liaising between the Board of ARESFFT and the jury, and retaining institutional memory from year to year. An experienced Facilitator is preferred, but training can be provided to the right candidate.

Fund Raiser

This person will be responsible for working with the Board to raise the funds necessary for ARESFFT to continue operation, in particular the cash prizes for award winners. Duties will include obtaining donations of give-aways from publishers and authors, and running online fund-raising events.

News Editor

This person will be responsible for keeping an eye out for translation-related news and posting articles to the Translation Awards website. Knowledge of WordPress is preferred.

With the year being more than half over, we need to be collecting lists of 2011-published works that are eligible for our next set of awards. If you know of a work that is eligible, please post a comment on our Nominations page. We’ll be getting in touch with the usual suspects — Haikasoru, Kurodahan, Black Coat and so on — to get their 2011 publication lists, but we need help spotting translated books published through other venues.

Well, we made it through one year. The winners have been decided, and the prizes presented. Certificates are going out to the honorable mentions. And one happy winner has got back to us. Here is a photograph of the award for Long form sent to us by Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud.

Before moving on we should once again thank all of the people who made this year possible. So very warm thanks once again to the authors, editors and publishers who donated books:

Neil Gaiman, Ann VanderMeer, Jeff VanderMeer, Gary K. Wolfe, Peter F. Hamilton, Kari Sperring, Nick Mamatas, Pyr Books, Nanopress and Tachyon Publications.

To the organizations who have sponsored us:

• The Science Fiction Research Association
• The Speculative Literature Foundation
• The Science Fiction Foundation

To our volunteer jurors: Terry Harpold, Abhijit Gupta and and Dale Knickerbocker.

And to everyone who donated money in our fund raiser.

Now we need to get on with next year. More on that soon.

We have finally got around to getting a Twitter account. We will, after all, need one for the award ceremony. And there may be other interesting stuff happening too. Next week, in fact. To keep up with what we are doing, follow @ARESFFT. (That’s the official name of our parent organization: the Association for the Recognition of Excellent in Science Fiction and Fantasy Translation.)

After much wrangling with bureaucracy we are delighted to announced that we are now fully registered as a tax-exempt, non-profit organization. US citizens who choose to donate money to us can claim those donations against taxes.

The Jury for the inaugural translation awards will be as follows:

• Terry Harpold, University of Florida, USA (Chair)
• Abhijit Gupta, Jadavpur University, India
• Dale Knickerbocker, East Carolina University, USA
• Leith Morton, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan
• Helen Pilinovski, CSU-San Bernardino, USA
• Lisa Raphals, UC-Riverside, USA

We would like to thank all of the jurors for agreeing to serve and wish them luck in their task of sifting through the many fine eligible works in search of winner.

We are delighted to report that CanSMOF, the parent corporation of Anticipation, the 2009 Worldcon, (which ran programming in both English and French) has granted us CA$500 from the surplus funds of the convention. The money will pay most of the costs of our incorporation on as non-profit organization. Our warmest thanks go out to CanSMOF and our friends in the French-speaking world who have made this possible.

By the way, our incorporation continues to progress slowly, as is the way with bureaucracy. As soon as we have a bank account and tax-exempt status we will let you know.

Words Without Borders, which bills itself as “The Online Magazine for International Literature” has devoted December 2009 to science fiction and fantasy. They have a range of translated works available, starting with a contribution from Stanisław Lem and moving on through role-playing in Japan and a vision of Poland conquered by Elves to a 14th Century epic fantasy from Pakistan. You can read it all here.

Just how many science fiction and fantasy books are published in English translation each year? That’s a question we kept getting asked when we first launched these awards. Well, the University of Rochester keeps track of all translated literature in the USA. Their blog is called Three Percent, because that’s roughly the proportion of books published in the USA each year that are translated. According to their data, there were 283 works of translated fiction (including collections and anthologies) and 65 works of translated poetry published in the USA in 2009.

Whether this list is a good guide to the size of our field is another matter. The list appears to be missing many of the science fiction and fantasy works published in 2009. It doesn’t cover books published in other countries such as the UK and Canada. And it doesn’t cover graphic novels, where a huge amount of translated work is published. But it does give a good idea of just how little fiction is translated into English. That’s something we hope to help change.