2nd EDITION – MALTA 2016

The ceremony of the Gerardo de Cremona International Translation Award in its second edition was held the 24th October 2016 in the city of Valetta (Malta). The event took place in the Mediterranean Conference Centre in the Maltese capital with an audience of 600 participants coming from 30 countries of both shores of the Mediterranean, as a part of the Euromediterranean Forum organized by the Anna Lindh foundation.

The ceremony was chaired by the President of Anna Lindh Foundation (Mme. Elisabeth Guigou) and co-hosted by COPEAM Secretary General (Mr. Claudio Cappon), the President of the Cremona City Council (Simona Pasquali), the President of MED-21 Program (Mohamed Aziza) and the Director of the Translators School of Toledo (Luis Miguel Cañada).

galardonados
Authorities and laureates

Laureates of the second edition of the Gerardo de Cremona Award are Francesca Maria Corrao (Palermo, 1956), translator specialised in Arabic poetry and popular literature, who claimed in his speech for a new humanism and the recovery of the spirit incarnated in figures like Gerardo de Cremona. In the category Translators from the Southern Shore the award went to the French-Iraqi Kadhim Jihad Hassan, (Nasiriya, 1955) poet, professor, literary cricit and translator with a long career of 40 years during which he has translated into Arabic the masterworks of European literature like Dante, Rimbaud, Fernando Pessoa, Rilke, Juan Goytisolo, etc.

In the category of Institutions, the Award went to the National Centre for Translation of Egypt, an institution that has published around 3000 translations since its establishment in 2003. Its director, Mr. Anwar Monghith, complained about the disparity in the volume of translations between both shores of the Mediterranean and the limited number of translations of Arabic works into European languages. The Spanish association ACE Traductores was also awarded. Its president, Carlos Fortea, stressed the role of the association during its 33 years of existance in the defence of labour rights of Spanish translators and praised the silent and sometimes not very well recognized figure of the translator.

Un momento de la ceremonia
A moment of the ceremony

DOCUMENTS:

Acceptance speech by Carlos Fortea, President of ACE Traductores (English)

Acceptance speech by Kadhim Jihad Hassan (French)