Frequently Asked Questions

Any undergraduate enrolled at a college or university in the United States, including two-year and community colleges. You must be 18 or older. There is no requirement about your major, your year, or how many credits you are taking — if you are an enrolled undergraduate, you are eligible.

No. Engineering students, biology students, and people who have never taken a literature course are all welcome. What matters is the translation you submit, not the department you belong to.

Not this cycle. You need to be an enrolled undergraduate at the time you submit. If you are a graduate student, we would still love to hear from you — see For Faculty and Graduate Students, where we are recruiting readers.

Not for this cycle. Entry is currently limited to undergraduates enrolled at colleges and universities in the United States. We are considering opening to Canadian institutions in a future cycle.

Not this cycle, and we’re sorry — this is the limit we like least.

The list is short because we will only accept a language when we have a judge who can read it well enough to evaluate your work fairly. Accepting a translation we cannot properly read would be worse than not accepting it.

The list will grow as we recruit more readers. Tell us what language you were hoping for when you join the interest list, and it helps us know where to look.

Up to 1,000 words in English. There is no minimum — a single short poem is a perfectly good entry, and a strong one is not at a disadvantage for being brief.

Anything that can be translated. Poetry, prose fiction, drama, essays, speeches, letters, journalism, a catalogue of poems — all of it is welcome. We have no preferred genre, and no genre is judged against a different standard.

One entry per person. If you submit more than once, we will consider your first submission and set the others aside, so send the one you most want read.

No. Each entry carries one name and must be the work of that one person. Co-translations are not eligible this cycle.

Getting feedback from a professor, a native speaker, or a friend is normal practice and does not make a translation a co-translation. The judgement to make is simple: the words in the final version should be yours.

Yes. Send the source passage that corresponds to your translation — just that passage, not the whole book or collection it came from — along with the author, title, date, publisher, and any copyright information you know.

Judges need the original in front of them to evaluate your work, and the bibliographic details are what let us clear permission later if your translation wins.

No. Every entry is reviewed for generative-AI use and for plagiarism, and an entry found to use either is withdrawn from consideration.

Ordinary reference tools are fine and always have been: dictionaries, grammars, parallel texts, glossaries, and asking a speaker of the language what a phrase means. The line is that the translation decisions have to be yours.

No. Well-translated texts get translated again — that is how translation works. You are welcome to take on a text that already exists in English.

The requirement is that your version is genuinely your own work, not an edit or a paraphrase of an existing translation.

No. Entering NULTA is free, and it always will be.

The submission form emails you a receipt as soon as you submit. If it hasn’t arrived within a few minutes, check your spam folder first, then write to us and we will confirm by hand.

No. Permission from the rights holder is not a condition of entering, because your submission stays confidential — it is read by our administrators and your assigned judge, and by nobody else.

Permission matters later, and only for winners: before any winning translation is published or read publicly, we work to obtain the permission that turns out to be needed. Our full Rights and Permissions policy explains this in detail.

NULTA administrators and the one judge assigned to your entry. That is the whole list.

Judges may not reproduce, distribute, publish, quote, or upload what they read, their access is revoked once evaluation is finished, and they are required to delete any copies they downloaded. Entries that do not win are deleted after the administrative review period, along with their source passages.

Winning does not guarantee publication, and publication is not a condition of winning. If an opportunity to publish arises, we will ask you first, and we will work to obtain any permission needed from the rights holder of the original before anything appears publicly.

If that permission cannot be obtained, the award still stands. We can confer and announce it without reproducing your translation or the source text.

NULTA does not take publication rights to your translation. It stays yours.

Yes. Administrators remove identifying information before entries reach judges, so your work is read on its own terms.

You can help: keep your name, your school, and your student ID out of the translation document itself. Put them only in the form fields that ask for them.

Faculty and graduate students at a range of universities, alongside NULTA’s organizers. Every entry is assigned to a judge who reads the source language, which is why the list of accepted languages is limited.

Finalists are notified on May 5, 2027. Winners are announced at an online ceremony on May 15, 2027.

The gap between the January deadline and May is the reading period — judging happens across the spring term, around the teaching schedules of the people doing it.

Three tiers. One NULTA Winner receives $500, one Distinguished Finalist receives $250, and three Special Recognitions receive $50 each.

Between one and three entries per judge, each capped at 1,000 words — roughly 60 to 90 minutes in total, scheduled at your convenience between January and April 2027.

We deliberately keep the load this small. It is easier to recruit a wide bench of readers who each give an hour than a handful who each give a week, and it means every entry is read by someone who is not exhausted by it.

Faculty members and graduate students at any institution who read one of the award’s source languages at a level sufficient to evaluate a literary translation into English. There is no requirement to hold a position in a translation or literature department.

Entries and their source passages are provided solely for the purpose of evaluation. Judges may not reproduce, distribute, publish, quote, upload, or otherwise repurpose the materials. Access is revoked at the close of evaluation, and judges are asked to delete any locally retained copies.

These terms are set out in full in the Rights and Permissions policy.