September 18, 2023—Today, the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) issues a set of guidelines for evaluating literary translation in hiring and promotion decisions. These guidelines are endorsed by the Modern Language Association (MLA), the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA), the American Translators Association (ATA), and the American Translation and Interpreting Studies Association (ATISA).
These guidelines are offered “for the academic evaluation of the artistic as well as scholarly contributions of faculty members whose work involves literary translation. … Literary translation is a primary creative and scholarly endeavor and not merely auxiliary or supplementary to other forms of academic production. Therefore it should be understood as an integral part of dossiers and given the same weight as analogous publications for hiring, tenure, promotion, and merit-pay reviews.”
The guidelines emphasize that “Literary translation not only offers access to texts and genres from around the world, but itself constitutes a mode of literary production.”
As of this publication, the guidelines have been signed by over 100 individuals from 68 institutions, including Aron Aji, Esther Allen, Brian James Baer, Susan Bernofsky, Geoffrey Brock, Jennifer Croft, Karen Emmerich, Kaiama L. Glover, Jack Jung, Bill Johnston, Mona Kareem, Alexis Levitin, Elizabeth Lowe, Breon Mitchell, Madalena Sánchez Zampaulo, Marian Schwartz, Samah Selim, Rainer Schulte, Lawrence Venuti, Emily Wilson, and many other luminaries.
“These guidelines came from a member asking us what our association’s position was on the assessment of literary translations for academics pursuing tenure or advancement,” said Ellen Elias-Bursać, President of the American Literary Translators Association. “In response, a vibrant group of ALTA members came together to write them. The way these communities—translators, teachers, and institutions that honor translators and instructors alike—joined forces over this has been inspiring.”
You can add your signature to the list here.
Read the full guidelines and view the full list of signatories:
The American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) unequivocally recommends that institutions of higher education and research treat works of literary translation as an integral part of dossiers, giving them the same weight as analogous publications (articles, creative works, and monographs) for hiring, tenure, promotion, and merit-pay reviews.
Translation has always been central to the production and dissemination of knowledge and culture. So, too, has it been central to the development of every academic discipline without exception, and it remains essential to their ongoing health and growth. Translation is a fundamentally hybrid practice, conjoining linguistic inquiry, scholarly research, creative invention, and public engagement. It mediates across national, cultural, and linguistic boundaries, as well as across time periods and fields.
Amid our era’s epidemic of language extinction and epistemic exclusion, translation combats what Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o has called the “dictatorship of the monolingual.” Those working in English and other hegemonic languages have a special responsibility to uphold the exchange across languages that sustains the world’s cultures and, in particular, its institutions of higher learning. Translators of literary and humanistic texts, with their profound knowledge of multiple cultural and linguistic contexts, provide essential nodes of contact and transmission, without which culture in general and scholarship in particular would stagnate in what Mikhail Bakhtin terms (in the translation by Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson) a “sealed-off and impermeable monoglossia.”
In literary translation, artistic and scholarly production coincide. Literary translation not only offers access to texts and genres from around the world, but itself constitutes a mode of literary production. It is a form of writing governed by extreme constraints. As rigorous as the composition of a sonnet or sestina, it requires not only a deep understanding of how style is created, but also the ability to write in many different styles; not only a sophisticated mastery of tone and nuance, but a sense of the direction in which a particular word choice will nudge a sentence; not only a profound familiarity with the literary and intellectual history and the cultural context in which the translated work was originally composed, but the ingenuity to make it come alive in another tongue.
Translation can be epoch-making. Works in translation have had a profound impact on human history, and translations of revelatory theoretical texts have revolutionized many intellectual traditions and academic disciplines at critical junctures in their history. Translators can be found across the university, teaching not only translation studies but also literature, languages, creative writing, linguistics, philosophy, history, religion, and social sciences more broadly. Each of these fields, and the many others in which translators work, has its own unique criteria for assessment.
For the evaluation of dossiers containing works of translation, institutions must engage qualified reviewers who can assess the significance of the translator’s achievement, taking these criteria in particular into account:
1) The originality and literary authority of the translator’s voice in shaping the work, and the marks of the translator’s erudition and ability to transform cultural knowledge into illuminating words on the page.
2) The specialized knowledge of the given field—be it contemporary French poetry, medieval Arabic travel writing, Danish sociology, or the 20th-century Japanese novel—that the translation draws on, embodies, deploys, and transmutes via the translator’s knowledge of the norms, terminology, historical and other contextual information, and fundamental concepts of corresponding fields in the target language. The American Council of Learned Societies’ Guidelines for the Translation of Social Science Texts, published in 2006, offers useful advice for a number of specific fields.
3) The challenges posed by the original text, which might be linguistic, stylistic, conceptual, theoretical, scholarly, historical, philosophical, etc., in nature, and the degree to which the translator has met these challenges with skill and panache.
The American Literary Translators Association offers these guidelines for the academic evaluation of the artistic as well as scholarly contributions of faculty members whose work involves literary translation. This statement supports and extends the document Evaluating Translations as Scholarship: Guidelines for Peer Review published in 2011 by the Modern Language Association. Literary translation is a primary creative and scholarly endeavor and not merely auxiliary or supplementary to other forms of academic production. Therefore it should be understood as an integral part of dossiers and given the same weight as analogous publications for hiring, tenure, promotion, and merit-pay reviews.
These guidelines were created by the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA), and are endorsed by the Modern Language Association (MLA), American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA), the American Translators Association (ATA), and the American Translation and Interpreting Studies Association (ATISA).
Signed,
Aron Aji, University of Iowa
Fabian Alfie, University of Arizona
Samer Ali, University of Michigan
Esther Allen, City University of New York
Celia Lopes Almeida, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Brian James Baer, Kent State University
John Balaban, North Carolina State University, Raleigh
David Ball, Smith College (Emeritus)
Curtis Bauer, Texas Tech University
Susan Bernofsky, Columbia University
Vladislav Beronja, University of Texas at Austin
John Biguenet, Loyola University New Orleans (Emeritus)
Aleksandar Boskovic, Columbia University
David Boyd, UNC Charlotte
Angela Brintlinger, Ohio State University
Joseph Ellison Brockway, CT State Community College – Tunxis
Geoff Brock, University of Arkansas
Anabel Buchenau, UNC Charlotte
Justin Cammy, Chair, World Literatures, Smith College
Peter Connor, Barnard College
Glen M. Cooper, (formerly) Brigham Young University
Sean Cotter, The University of Texas at Dallas
Jennifer Croft, University of Tulsa
Cassio de Oliveira, Portland State University
Nathan H. Dize, Washington University in Saint Louis
Emily Drumsta, The University of Texas at Austin
Ellen Elias-Bursac, President, American Literary Translators Association
Alexander Elinson, Hunter College, CUNY
Karen Emmerich, Princeton University
Harley Erdman, University of Massachusetts at Amherst
Marguerite Feitlowitz, Bennington College
Eunice Rodríguez Ferguson, Columbia University
Anne O. Fisher, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Stephen Forrest, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Sibelan Forrester, Swarthmore College
Dawn Fulton, Smith College
Thomas Jesús Garza, University of Texas at Austin
Torsa Ghosal, California State University, Sacramento
Kaiama L Glover, Barnard College, Columbia University
Isabel C. Gómez, University of Massachusetts Boston
Reid Gómez, University of Arizona
Kiki Gounaridou, Smith College
David Gramling, University of British Columbia (Musqueam land)
Daryl R. Hague, Brigham Young University
Faith Harden, University of Arizona
Marguerite Itamar Harrison, Smith College
Elizabeth Holt, Bard College
Robert A. Hueckstedt, University of Virginia
Joanna Trzeciak Huss, Kent State University
Moira Inghilleri, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Adrian Izquierdo, Baruch College, CUNY
Bill Johnston, Indiana University
Jack Jung, Davidson College
Gregory Jusdanis, The Ohio State University
Mona Kareem, Washington University in St. Louis
Nathalie Arnold Koenings, Hampshire College
Sarah Kortemeier, University of Arizona
Denise Kripper, Lake Forest College
Raja Lahiani, UAE University
Reyes Lazaro, Smith College
Alexis Levitin, SUNY-Plattsburgh
Elizabeth Lowe, New York University
J. Bret Maney, Lehman College, CUNY
Christopher Maurer, Boston University
Stephanie McCarter, University of the South
Janice McGregor, University of Arizona
Becka Mara McKay, Florida Atlantic University
Tyler Meier, Executive Director, University of Arizona Poetry Center
Christi Merrill, University of Michigan
Stiliana Milkova, Oberlin College
Stephen Miller, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Breon Mitchell, Indiana University
Catherine Nelson, Nebraska Wesleyan University
Mary Neuburger, University of Texas at Austin
Dragana Obradović, University of Toronto
Jeannette Okur, University of Texas at Austin
Thalia Pandiri, Smith College
Oana Popescu-Sandu, University of Southern Indiana
Djordje Popović, University of California, Berkeley
Antje Postema, University of California, Berkeley
Yopie Prins, University of Michigan
Gregary J. Racz, LIU Brooklyn
Cristina Devereaux Ramirez, University of Arizona
Virginia Ramos, University of San Francisco
Allan Reid, University of New Brunswick (retired)
Luis-Fernando Restrepo, University of Arkansas
Elias G. Saba, Grinnell College
Mohammed Sawaie, University of Virginia
Marian Schwartz, Past President, American Literary Translators Association
Rainer Schulte, University of Texas at Dallas
Samah Selim, Rutgers University
Patricia Sieber, The Ohio State University
Nadine Sinno, Virginia Tech
Adam J. Sorkin, Penn State University (Emeritus)
Ilan Stavans, Amherst College and Restless Books
Jan Steyn, University of Iowa
Susan E. Swanberg, University of Arizona School of Journalism
Lucy Swanson, University of Arizona
Babak Tabarraee, University of Texas at Austin
Corine Tachtiris, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Adam Talib, The American University in Cairo
Carolyn Tipton, University of California, Berkeley
Karen Van Dyck, Columbia University
Russell Scott Valentino, Indiana University
Lawrence Venuti, Temple University (Emeritus)
Bojana Videkanic, University of Waterloo
Jeffrey Wallen, Hampshire College
Emily Wilson, University of Pennsylvania
Christopher Winks, Queens College/CUNY
Michelle Woods, SUNY New Paltz
Madalena Sánchez Zampaulo, President, American Translators Association
Barbara Zecchi, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Anna Zielinska-Elliott, Boston University
Erin Graff Zivin, University of Southern California
About the American Literary Translators Association
The American Literary Translators Association is a nonprofit arts membership association that provides resources, community, and professional affiliation to its members: individual translators, academic institutions, presses, and others working in literary translation. The annual ALTA conference, held in a different location each year, is the largest gathering of literary translators in the United States, bringing together around 500 translators, writers, and editors each year. The ALTA conference is structured around the creation of high-quality art. ALTA administers awards to recognize excellence in translation, and provides fellowships and mentorships to support emerging translators.
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