FrançaisConference : The contradictions of the globalisation of the publishing industry
Book translations in non-national languages
Author/s : Anthony Pym
Any sociology of translational exchanges needs to start from hard data, and the hardest data available are framed by the category of the nation. Serious sociology thus finds itself engaged to the nation state. And so we speak of books in the US, of the American market, of translation into US or UK English. We thus necessarily decry the unequal exchanges between the US, for example, and other nation states. The finding is as nationalist as is the methodological point of departure.
At the same time, we are well aware that the model of the monolingual nation state only ever applied to Europe, and even there only occasionally. Our globalizing spaces are filling with multicultural states, with literatures that do not respect national boundaries, and with sciences that are developed and communicated in professional intercultures, using professional international languages, escaping the control of customs officers. The border between nations is thus seen as what it has always been: a legal fiction.
That particular fiction has nevertheless been eminently useful for the translation form. And translation has in turn given discursive form to the border. We translate not just because we want to understand someone on the other side, but also so that the other’s actual words stay on the other side. To translate first involves refusing general usage of a foreign language.
In this rationalization of communicative resources, a nation state that privileges and funds translations should at the same time be protecting or imposing monolingual hegemony.
The not-so-hard data might yet tell a different story. It seems that, the more a nation state translates, the more it actually allows the publication of books in non-official languages. This is one of the paradoxes hidden in statistical bases like the Index translationum, despite all its problems (our analysis is based on 18 languages in 1979-83). To explain the paradox, at least some reference is necessary to the world language system, to the different functions of major and minor languages. We will propose that small and mid-size languages tend to open cultures through several simultaneous strategies (translation alongside the domestic use of international languages), whereas cultures with major national languages still remain hegemonic in their privileging of translation.
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January 9th-10th, 2009 - Intellectual space in Europe (19th-21st c.)
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