ABSTRACT
In “Prizing Children’s Literature: The Case of Newbery Gold,” Kenneth Kidd notes that the Newbery Medal claims universality through a culturally selective and arguably narrow set of ideals about literary excellence. In this essay, I build on Kidd’s argument by examining literary prizes for translation, which reect more than challenge the dynamics of privilege and especially the hegemony of the English language. I focus on the ways in which translated texts, children’s or adult, prized or otherwise, do not fare well in the U.S., and on how a literary prize for translations can do little to create gold or elevate the status of the text in terms of sales and visibility. I also show how texts that favor normative Western cultures and ideologies dominate prizes for translated children’s books. International prizes, while minimally recognized, often contradict their own mission of transnational enlargement, not from bias within the award systems per se, but rather because of translation publishing conditions. “Domesticated” translations are favored over “foreignizing” translations, thus privileging authors and texts from Highly Developed Western nations. Using several high prole international and translation children’s awards, I supply quantitative data on the winning nations’ Human Development ranking1 (as determined by the United Nations’ Human Development Index), and apply this twopronged focus, the rst concerning a translation’s invisibility and the second concerning a text’s First World representation, to the American Library Association’s Mildred L. Batchelder Translation Award. In this analysis, I 1) outline the ways in which not all prizes are successful; 2) demonstrate how translated texts are few in numbers; 3) discuss how awarded texts privilege normative Western ideologies, thus limit a construct of international; and nally 4) address how such a limited international construct manifests among ve of the more dominant international and translation awards for children’s literature, including the Batchelder. Throughout, I maintain that the Batchelder Award cannot make visible what is invisible; awards can only amplify visibility. I argue, too, that translation and international prizes are often limited in their construction of “international” and therefore do not offer a true sense of global and varied childhoods, their ostensible purpose.
