Each year, the ALTA National Translation Award honors a translator whose work, by virtue of both its quality and significance, has made an extraordinary contribution to literary translation during the preceding year. The award carries a $2,500 stipend. Each year, more than 100 translations from at least two dozen languages are entered for consideration.

To be eligible for the award, a translation must have been published during the preceding calendar year by a U.S. or Canadian publisher and must be a book-length work, in English, of fiction, poetry, drama, or creative non-fiction (literary criticism and philosophy are not eligible). For nominated books selected as finalists, publishers will be asked to provide an original-language version of the text; any finalist for which no original-language version is provided will be excluded from further consideration.