The American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) was co-founded by Rainer Schulte and A. Leslie Willson in 1978 at The University of Texas at Dallas.
[1] ALTA's own scholarly journal, Translation Review, was also founded in 1978 and has been published regularly ever since.
In recent years, ALTA conference organizers have selected a conference theme to guide panel, workshop, and roundtable proposals in the direction of a broadly defined aspect of literary translation studies.
The original work may have been written in any language, but in order to be eligible for the NTA, the translation must be into English, and the book must have been published during the preceding calendar year.
For a complete list of past winners, see the main National Translation Award page.
Eligible translations may be from Chinese, Hindi, Japanese, Kannada, Korean, Sanskrit, Tamil, Thai, or Vietnamese into English.
This $5,000 prize will be awarded annually to a translator of a work of Italian prose (fiction or literary non-fiction) published in the previous calendar year.
The award recognizes translations into English of literary prose works written originally by authors of Spanish (Spain) nationality published in the previous calendar year.
This annual prize is open to all genres, and awards one debut literary translation from any other language into English published in the previous calendar year.
Each year, four to six winners are selected through a competitive application process, and ALTA Fellows give a public reading of their work at the conference.