The Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (İKSV) introduced an encouragement award in 2015 to support outstanding translations of literary works, including but not limited to poetry, short stories and novels from other languages to Turkish-language. İKSV’s first award to date in the field of literature, Talât Sait Halman Translation Award was presented for the fourth time for the year 2018.
Former recipients of the award were Siren İdemen with her translation of La Boutique Obscure: 124 Rêves by Georges Perec, Ahmet Arpad with his translation of Transit by Anna Seghers, and Fuat Sevimay with his outstanding translation of Finnegans Wake by James Joyce.
This year, the Talât Sait Halman Translation Award received applications from translators and publication houses with a range of literary works, including poems, short stories and novels translated from English, German, Spanish, French, Russian, Persian, Japanese, Greek, Bulgarian, Chinese, Korean, and Norwegian.
In 2018, İKSV decided to honour Ahmet Cemal, an esteemed author and translator, and a former member of the Talât Sait Halman Translation Award’s Selection Committee who passed away in 2017, by awarding another literary prize. The one-off Ahmet Cemal First Translation Award, aimed at translators who had published their first novel or short story, was presented alongside the Talât Sait Halman Translation Award.
The recipient of the 2018 Talât Sait Halman Translation Award: Ülker İnce
TApplications by publishing houses and individual translators for the Talât Sait Halman Translation Award was evaluated by Selection Committee headed by author Doğan Hızlan, and composed of author, translator, and critic Sevin Okyay; translator Ayşe Sarısayın; author and translator Yiğit Bener, and author and translator Kaya Genç. Selection Committee presented the Talât Sait Halman Translation Award that involves a monetary prize of TL20.000 to Ülker İnce, for her outstanding translation of the Argentinian author Alberto Manguel’s novella, El Regreso (The Return).
Selection Committee justifies their decision with the following statement: ‘Alberto Manguel devoted his life to literature since his young age when he narrated books to visually-impaired Jorge Luis Borges. His books that travel across geographies and genres from A History of Reading to The Dictionary of Imaginary Places and Five Cities in Turkey, are much cherished by his readers in Turkey. Known for her contributions to translation studies in Turkey, Ülker İnce introduces Manguel’s intense text in which the author confronts history, memory and the state of being exiled into Turkish-language, measuring up to the text’s harmony, music and opulent lexicon. She presents a distilled translation from her translation practice that she pursued from the 1970s on.’
Ülker İnce worked as an instructor at the School of Foreign Languages and the Department of Translation and Interpretation of Hacettepe University (1974-1989). In 1985 she was awarded first prize for her translation of Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet by Yazko Translation Journal of Turkish Writers’ Union. While she was giving courses in translation and theory of translation at the Department of Translation Studies of Boğaziçi University (1898-2000), she also worked for Can and Telos publishing houses as editor of translated works. In 2000 she received the Translation Association’s Honorary Award. In 2014, she was awarded The Year’s Translation Prize of Dünya newspaper for her translation of Oscar Wild’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.
She is the co-writer with Işın Bengi of Kızılcık Karpuz Olur mu hiç? İlahi çevirmen! (Diye Publications, Istanbul, 2009) dealing with the questions of what kind of an activity translation is and what can be taught in literary translation classes. She also co-wrote with Dilek Dizdar, Çeviri Atölyesi (Can Publishing, Istanbul, 2017), dealing with the translation of texts between languages with different structures and conventions of textualisation.
The Special Jury Award was presented to Gökhan Sarı
The Talât Sait Halman Translation Award Selection Committee also decided to give a Special Jury Award to Gökhan Sarı for his courage and success in translating Mark Z. Danielewski’s challenging and multifaceted cult novel House of Leaves into Turkish.
Gökhan Sarı was born in 1992 in Adapazarı. After graduating from Sakarya Anatolian High School, he studied economics at Marmara University. He has been working as a freelance literature translator since 2014 and as an editor at Aylak Adam Publishing & Zeplin Kitap Publications since 2015. His translations include Youth (Joseph Conrad, Alakarga Publications), Submergence (J.M. Ledgard, Jaguar Kitap Publications), Butterflies in November (Audur Ava Olafsdottir, Pinhan Publications), and The Good Soldier (Ford Madox Ford, Aylak Adam Publications).
2018 Ahmet Cemal First Translation Award is shared by Sevcan Şahin and Sinan Ceylan
2018 Ahmet Cemal First Translation Award that involves a monetary prize of €10,000 is shared by Sinan Ceylan for his translation of Junichiro Tanizaki’s A Cat, a Man, and Two Women from Japanese into Turkish, and Sevcan Şahin for her translation of José Eduardo Agualusa’s A General Theory of Oblivion from Portuguese into Turkish.
The Selection Committee justifies their decision with the following statement: ‘This award was created with the aim of supporting and encouraging young translators who published their first novel or short story translation in the last year. As the members of the Selection Committee, we evaluated all of the works and their success in using the Turkish-language in particular and decided to reward these two translators because we were convinced that they will do even more competent translations in the future.’
Sevcan Şahin
Sevcan Şahin was born in 1984 in Çorum, Turkey. She completed her primary and high school education in Antalya. After graduating from Zonguldak Karaelmas University, Department of Economics, she started her master’s degree in Development Economics at Marmara University. Later she worked for a non-governmental organisation in Barcelona for one year as part of the European Voluntary Service (EVS). Meanwhile she began to learn Catalan and Spanish. She also completed her master's degree in Labour Studies at the Global Labour University (GLU) of Unicamp University in Brazil. She is a PhD student at the University of São Paulo (USP). She also works at the São Paulo Cultural and Tourism Attaché. Her fundamental interests are cultural studies, cinema, gender, migration, and labour studies.
Sinan Ceylan
Sinan Ceylan was born in Bandırma in 1989. He completed his bachelor degree in Japanese Language at Canakkale Onsekiz Mart University. During his education, he went to Japan via Ishikawa Alumni Association scholarship. Following his graduation, he moved to Istanbul and worked for Japan-based enterprises a translator. Sinan Ceylan’s first literary translation was of the novella A Cat, a Man, and Two Women by one of the greatest Japanese authors, Junichiro Tanizaki (Jaguar Kitap Publications, 2017). The second book he translated was Miner by Natsume Soseki (Jaguar Kitap Publications, 2018). His latest translation is of Evil and the Mask by the contemporary Japanese author Fuminori Nakamura, due to be published by Doğan Kitap Publications in 2019.