Call for Translators � Burmese to English Short Fiction

This is a fantastic, paid, opportunity for Burmese to English literary translators to work on a new collection of short stories from Myanmar.� I have copied the announcement below from the collection�s editor, Alfred Birnbaum, but am wary of putting his private email contact address publicly.� So if anyone is interested please just use the contact form on Sadaik and I will pass you onto Alfred …

�The UK National Centre for Literary Translation and Stranger’s Press have launched a joint project, supported by PEN UK, to publish an anthology of modern-to-contemporary Burmese short stories, tentatively titled Yezet after the popular Buddhist belief that persons with affinities share “droplets” from previous lives. The collection will comprise some 25 stories in 5 chapbooks, organised by author generations from the 1960s to today, to give foreign readers a sense of how social conditions and writers’ voices have changed decade by decade. The idea is to give equal focus to all authors past and present within an objective framework and let the stories themselves relate the changes in Burmese literary history.

As you may know, Burmese-English translators are in short supply, but we hope you might be up for the challenge. The stories range from around 4pp to 20pp and vary from moderate to fairly difficult in style (generally no obscure terminology or slang); the older stories tend to be longer and more complicated. The deadline for the first draft is mid-December this year, with further editorial back-and-forth until May toward a November 2020 publication date. Compensation will be �95 per 1000 words.

If you are potentially interested and/or want further information, please contact us ASAP. The task of finding the “right” translator for the “right” author is of course a problem, so any relevant particulars you can tell us about your language level or interests would be extremely helpful.’

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