Our Selection Committee conducts a meticulous study and follows a multi-staged procedure to determine the award winner in order to make a selection based on fair, impartial, and objective criteria.
It is our primary principle that all applications are taken into consideration; every application is delivered to all jury members for evaluation.
The selection committee distributes all translations at its first meeting to ensure every submission is fairly assessed: Initially, committee members evaluate translations from the languages in which they are proficient. To ensure that none of the translations is overlooked, translations from languages in which none of the committee members is proficient are distributed among the members.
The translations are preliminarily evaluated on the basis of their command, and use of the Turkish language, translations which are found inadequate according to this criterion are eliminated. At the end of this stage, the selection committee holds an intermediate meeting to determine the finalists from amongst the translations that are assessed as prize-worthy for their proficiency in Turkish.
For each translation found eligible for the final evaluation, a technical report is prepared to compare it to the source text. The assistance of an external expert will be requested for translations made from languages in which none of the committee members is proficient.
These reports investigate, whether the language and tone of the Turkish translation corresponds to the author’s literary style and skill; whether the facts, substantial information, and intellectual concepts are conveyed adequately, comprehensibly and with the appropriate terminology; whether the challenges that are intrinsic to the language of the source text or originating from the differences in cultural context and the particular difficulties arising from the author’s wording and style are adequately resolved in the translation; whether the translation contains deliberate omissions or misrepresentations of sentences/ paragraphs/ sections/ words which might be considered politically/ philosophically/ religiously/ morally motivated “censorship”; in brief, whether if any issues identified in a translation that would make it being awarded objectionable. In order for these reports to be comparable and as objective as possible, the selection committee has established a set of guidelines which reflect the minimum evaluation criteria.
At the concluding meeting of the selection committee, all finalists are evaluated by each member once again in the light of these reports as well as on the basis of the command and use of Turkish language. Following the discussions, voting commences and the translation deemed worthy of the award is determined.