Mildred L. Batchelder Award

The Mildred L. Batchelder Award, or Batchelder Award, is an American Library Association literary award that annually recognizes the year's "most outstanding" children's book translated into English and published in the U.S.

It is administered by the Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC), the children's division of ALA, and conferred upon the U.S. publisher.

The award is named in honor of Mildred L. Batchelder, former director of the ALSC. One of her stated goals was "to eliminate barriers to understanding between people of different cultures, races, nations, and languages."

The Mildred L. Batchelder Award is unusual in that it is given to a publisher yet it explicitly references a given work, its translator and author. It seeks to recognize translations of children's books into the English language, with the intention of encouraging American publishers to translate high quality foreign language children's books and "promote communication between the people of the world".

The Batchelder Award was inaugurated in 1968 and there have been 44 winners in 45 years through 2012.

From 1994 there have been 31 worthy runners up called Honor Books, one to three each year.

The 2012 winner (publ year?) is Eerdmans Books for Young Readers, an imprint of Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., for Soldier Bear, translated by Laura Watkinson. The Dutch original Soldaat Wojtek (2008) was written by Bibi Dumon Tak, illustrated by Philip Hopman. It was announced January 23, 2012.