NIF To Start Accepting Applications For Translation Fellowships: What It Is And How To Apply

To mark India's 74th Independence Day, the New India Foundation (NIF) is set to start inviting applications for the first round of the NIF Translation Fellowship. The winners will be awarded the fellowship for the year 2022.

The new translation fellowship has been developed specifically to encourage translating excellent works of non-fiction into Indian languages. The fellowship will highlight India's rich regional literature to showcase the country's rich history and culture. 

The new fellowship will be an addition to the already operating NIF programme which has so far resulted in the publication of 22 books.

The Jury for these fellowships this year includes the NIF Trustees: political scientist Niraja Gopal Jayal, historian Srinath Raghavan, and entrepreneur Manish Sabharwal alongside the Language Expert Committee.

How To Apply

Applications for the fellowship will open on August 11, 2021 and will be on till December 31. 

Proposals are invited from translators for ten languages including Assamese, Bangla, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Marathi, Malayalam, Odia, Tamil and Urdu. The selection panel will consist of a Language Expert Committee comprising of esteemed bilingual scholars, professors, academics, and literary translators.

The Translation Fellowship will be granted on the basis of the choice of text, quality of translation, and overall project proposal.

No constraints on the genre are applicable to the non-fiction source texts that can range between from any of the 10 languages and can be ecumenical, as long as it elucidates upon any socio-economic/cultural aspect of Indian history from the year 1850 onwards. 

What is the Translation Fellowship?

The aim of the Translation Fellowships is to tap into the rich repository of non-fiction literature in Indian languages and make these works accessible to wider audiences. 

Speaking on this initiative, Niraja Gopal Jayal, Trustee, New India Foundation said, “There is an old saying about India that ‘kos-kos mein badle paani; chaar kos mein vaani’. A culture is captured by its symbols, heroes, rituals, history and writing; the NIF translation fellowships aim to make more of our culture accessible to new audiences.”