How to Submit

Before you start

Make sure you have reviewed the eligibility and rules. That way you can be sure your format, language, and submission meet the award requirements.

Choose your award

You choose which award your translation belongs to when you submit. Work that could sit in either category may be entered wherever you prefer to place it.

• NULTA Prose Award — Essays, novel excerpts, short fiction, lyrical prose, drama, or another form of prose.
• NULTA Poetry Award — A single poem, a sequence of poems, prose poetry, or another form of poetry.

One entry per person in each award: at most one prose entry and one poetry entry. If you’re submitting both, you can send them together in a single submission.

What to prepare

Two documents per award you enter: your translation, and the source passage it corresponds to.

1. Your translation

Up to 1,000 words in English per award. You may enter both awards, with up to 1,000 English words in each category.

PDF or Word document preferred, and a scan or photograph of the source passage is fine as long as it is clearly legible. Line breaks, stanza divisions, indentation, and any spacing reach the judge exactly as you send it. Administrators make sure that identifying details are removed and that entries are always presented standardly, so there’s no need to fuss over fonts or margins. Please keep your name, institution, and personal information out of the actual file itself.

You may work with one co-translator or by yourself. Please ensure only one of you submits the translation.

2. The source passage

Send only the passage your translation corresponds to — not the entire book, collection, or archive it came from.

Include as much of the following as you know:

• Author
• Title of the work, and of the collection or publication it appeared in
• Date of publication or composition
• Publisher
• Any copyright information you are aware of, included as a note at the bottom of the document

Please make sure to keep your personal information out of the source passage file to help NULTA administrators.

How to submit

Submissions are made through a Google Form. It will ask for your name, an official institution-issued email address, your institution, your source language, and the documents above.

• You will get a receipt. The form emails a confirmation as soon as you submit. If it hasn’t arrived in a few minutes, check spam, then write to us.
• Submission is free.
• No institutional email? If your institution does not issue student email addresses, or yours is not working, write to us and we will verify your enrollment another way.

The deadline

Registration closes December 10, 2026 at 11:59 p.m. ET. Registering takes one minute and is required for participation.

Submissions close January 10, 2027 at 11:59 p.m. ET.

We would rather read a translation you finished than one you rushed, so give yourself more than the last evening.

What happens next

1. Administrative review. We check eligibility, remove identifying information, and read entries with an eye to academic integrity. If anything raises a question about authorship we contact you and give you a chance to respond before any decision — see how that works.
2. Anonymous evaluation. Each entry goes to a judge who reads its source language. Judging runs across the spring term.
3. Shortlist contacted on April 20, 2027 to arrange an informal interview about how and why you made your translation decisions.
4. Winners notified on May 25, 2027. If you were not shortlisted, we will let you know by then as well.
5. Online ceremony on June 1, 2027.

You do not need permission from the rights holder to enter. Copyright, confidentiality, and what happens to a winning translation are all covered on Rights and Permissions.