How to Crowdfund Your Translation

This article was last updated on April 16, 2022

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A piece in Qantara magazine explores the new trend of crowdfunding support for translations and provides tips from successful crowdfunders:

The “A Bird is not a Stone” campaign, which ran in early 2014, supported a collection of Palestinian poetry. It wasn’t as viral or high-rolling as major movie or political campaigns, or as one US man’s campaign to make a potato salad, which raised $55,492. Co-editors Sarah Irving and Henry Bell targeted a reasonable £3,000, an amount that would cover travel expenses for select Palestinian poets to come to Scotland, as well as additional distribution of the book. They were delighted to exceed that goal by £540.

Irving and Bell had a number of advantages over other literary crowdfunding campaigns. First, their book contained the work of 25 Palestinian poets and 25 Scottish poet-translators. “I think the fact that there were so many established poets with good contacts did make it a lot easier,” said Irving via e-mail.

“But I think there were other factors that need to be taken into account,” she said. One of these was the general interest in Palestine. “So there were a lot of solidarity and political links, which I think also helped to spread the word.”

Successes and failures

But “A Bird is not a Stone” was not the only successful literary-translation crowdfunding campaign this year. The campaign for “Settled Wanderers”, a collection of Sahrawi poetry put together by English poet and translator Sam Berkson, also met its goal. The poet’s stated aim was to “revisit the Saharawi refugee camps in Algeria to collect Saharawi poetry to translate & publish with Influx Press.”

With 51 backers, Berkson exceeded his modest £1,100 goal by £236. Notably, both projects already had a publisher signed on and both asked for relatively small amounts of money.

However, not all of this year’s literary-translation kickstarters have been successful.  This fall, Darf Publishers hosted a crowdfunding campaign to support the translation of Alessandro Spina’s 1,300-page epic, “The Confines of the Shadow”, into English. Spina is the nom de plume of Benghazi-born author Basili Shafik Khouzam, and his acclaimed books, written in Italian, tell a story of pre-colonial Libya.

Darf raised only £325 of its £8000 goal, despite running for two months, from August 24 to October 23. Translator André Naffis-Sahely, who is working on this project, said he wasn’t sure why the campaign had come up short while the “A Bird is not a Stone” campaign had been so successful. But he agreed that, in the Western consciousness, “Palestine trumps Libya any day.”

Beyond translation

Other book-related projects have allowed Arab publishers, authors and book-lovers to reach out beyond borders. Zoomaal, a crowdfunding site designed to support Arab projects, this year hosted a successful campaign for “Alkindy”, a literary space in Tripoli, Lebanon. Organiser Najwa Sahmarani raised $25,000 towards the goal of launching the library and literary-event space.

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