The all-important Canada Council Grant

It was requested of me to post about the process of getting a grant. Well, here's what I know: with a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts, you can get paid up to 18 cents/word for literary translation. Without, it may be half that, or less. But there are some pretty stringent rules surrounding these grants, specifically on the subject of who can apply for them. Briefly: as an author or translator, you may not apply for a grant. Coincidentally, usually as a translator you may not negotiate for the English-language rights for a French book from the book's publisher. I knew this when I set out, so I didn't try to negotiate with Leméac, I just contacted them to make sure that the English-language rights were still available, and they said something along the lines of "yes, but don't you come 'round here asking about them 'til you get yourself a publisher!"

Here are the criteria that the grant applicant must fit into. You can get an "emerging publisher" grant, or just a standard "block grant," but even the emerging publisher grant is only for publishers who have published between 4 and 15 books. So it's not like you can choose to self-publish and apply for this grant... unless you've already published 4 books.

Here is a pretty great little summary of the Canadian literary translation scene - including a list of potential publishers - found on the website of the Literary Translators' Association of Canada.

There are also provincial grants that you can apply for, but I really don't know much about them... I've got to look into that. But this site is a good resource for grants listed by province.