Turkish has been chosen as the main language for the distinguished translations vying for the Sheikh Hamad Award for Translation and International Understanding literary award in the eighth edition of the competition organized by Qatar since 2015. The winner will receive $200,000.

The competition is targeting Turkish translators in an effort to increase the cultural ties between the two countries by translating more books from Turkish to Arabic this year while seeking to enrich the world's cultural heritage with notable translations from the Arab world of literature and art. Applications will be accepted until July 15.

The translation event also aims to encourage cross-cultural interaction through the translation medium. Among the languages, last year's competition included English, Persian, Pashto, Bengali, Swedish, Korean and Hausa.

Turkish is one of the world's most widely spoken languages and it continues to spread to greater masses by the day. It is rooted in the Altaic languages and is one of the oldest languages in the world.

One of the distinctive characteristics of Turkish is that it is an agglutinative language that uses complex words consisting of many elements to express concepts. In that sense, one of the most essential concepts in the Turkish language is harmony, which is applied to consonants and vowels in various cases so the language flows more easily.