The Armenian Communities Department of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation has launched The Calouste Gulbenkian Translation Series Project, which aims to make fundamental texts in the humanities and the social sciences available in Armenian. The coordinator of the project in Armenia is ARI Literature Foundation.

In the framework of the project, a number of valuable humanitarian and sociological works by world-renowned authors of the 20th and 21st centuries, which have not been translated into Armenian before, will be published in eastern and western Armenian translation. The translations will be particularly useful for scholars and students to facilitate advancement of intellectual discourse in Armenia.

This initiative will also contribute to the modernisation of the Armenian language, the introduction of a new terminological vocabulary, and the expansion of the pool of translators.

At this stage the following translations of the series have been published:

• Giorgio Agamben, Quel che resta di Auschwitz. L’archivio e il testimone (Homo sacer III), Actual Arvest Publishing House, 2020
• Jürgen Habermas, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit, Ankyunaqar Publishing House, 2021
• Alain Badiou, Le Siècle, Newmag Publishing House, 2021
• Michel Foucault, L’archéologie du savoir, Zangak Publishing House, 2022
• Jean-Francois Lyotard, La condition postmoderne; Instructions Païennes et Le Postmoderne expliqué aux enfants 2022

By the end of 2022 and beginning of 2023 the following books will be published in translation:

• Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere
• Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
• Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Zizek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left
• Simone de Beauvoir, Le deuxième sexe
• Edward Said, Orientalism

An internationally based committee of experts has been established to select the texts for translation. The committee members are:

• Shushan Avagyan – Literary translator and lecturer, Translation Certificate Program, College of Humanities and Social Sciences, American University of Armenia.
• Vardan Azatyan –Lecturer, associate professor at the Yerevan State Academy of Fine Arts ; Director of the Ashot Hovhannisyan Research Institute in the Humanities, Armenia.
• Hagop Gulludjian – Lecturer in Armenian Studies, Department of Near Eastern Languages & Cultures, UCLA, USA.
• Smbat Hovhannisyan – Lecturer at the Chair of World History, Department of History, Yerevan State University, Armenia, Ph.D in History.
• Armine Ishkanian – Assistant Professor and Programme Director of the MSc in Social Policy and Development, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK.
• Raymond Kévorkian – Directeur émérite de recherche, Institut Français de Géopolitique, Université Paris VIII, Saint-Denis.
• Ardashes Margosyan – Former Chief Editor of Aras Yayıncılık Publishing, Istanbul.
• Ara Sanjian – Associate Professor in Armenian and Middle Eastern History, Director of the Armenian Research Center, University of Michigan at Dearborn, USA.