NEA Literary Translation Fellowships

       The American National Endowment for the Arts has announced their fiscal year 2015 Literary Translation Fellowships -- US$300,000 shared by 20 translators.
       The recipients -- and descriptions of their projects -- can be found here -- alas, only in the dreaded pdf format.
       Some interesting-sounding projects. As to the languages from which the works will be translated: there are 12 (including one project translating from both Spanish and ... Isthmus Zapotec). With only twenty projects there are only so many languages that can be covered; nevertheless .....
       The number of projects/languages are:

• 6.5: Spanish
  
  
• 2: French
• 2: Persian
• 2: Russian
  
  
• 1: Arabic
• 1: Chinese
• 1: Dutch
• 1: Italian
• 1: Korean
• 1: Polish
• 1: Yiddish
  
  
• .5: Isthmus Zapotec

       Also of interest: they offer a downloadable booklet which: "brings together essays by 19 translators and individuals who help to make translated works available", The Art of Empathy: Celebrating Literature in Translation (warning ! dreaded pdf format !).
       A nice collection of very short pieces (by a pretty stellar cast) about many aspects of literature in translation (including Chad Post on 'The Myth of the "Three Percent Problem"' ...) -- with a bonus of recommended titles-in-translation (not all of which are translations-into-English ...) by each contributor.