“Visible” at Last? Some Notes on English as a Target Language and Translated Books in the US

Giuseppe Palumbo

doi:10.4312/elope.18.1.55-69

Authors

Giuseppe Palumbo University of Trieste

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.4312/elope.18.1.55-69

Keywords:

translated books, translation flows, globalization, translation into English, translated literature

Abstract

In the international system of translations, English has been described as playing a “hypercentral” role. At the same time, translation is seen as playing a marginal role in the Anglo-American cultural and publishing scenarios. The present paper is aimed at revisiting this idea. After an overview of recent studies that have examined the role and significance of translated titles in the publishing markets of English-speaking countries, the paper reports on an exploratory analysis of records available in a database that collects information on books in translation published or distributed in the US starting from 2008. The analysis indicates that translation is enjoying a renewed attention in the US market, in terms of both the number of translated titles and the distribution of translations across different genres.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

References

Ban, Ana. 2015. “Books in Translation in the United States.” Publishing Research Quarterly 31 (3): 160–74. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12109-015-9406-7.

Bielsa, Esperança. 2016. Cosmopolitanism and Translation: Investigations into the Experience of the Foreign. Translation Theories Explored. London: Routledge.

Bielsa, Esperança. 2020. “Introduction: the Intersection between Translation and Globalization.” In The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Globalization, edited by Esperança Bielsa and Dionysios Kapsaskis, 1–10. London: Routledge.

Bielsa, Esperança, and Dionysios Kapsaskis, eds. 2020. The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Globalization. London: Routledge.

Brisset, Annie, and Raúl E. Colón Rodríguez. 2020. “World Translation Flows.” In The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Globalization, edited by Esperança Bielsa and Dionysios Kapsaskis, 230–50. London: Routledge.

Büchler, Alexandra, and Giulia Trentacosti. 2015. Publishing Translated Literature in the United Kingdom and Ireland 1990–2012. Statistical Report. Aberystwyth: Mercator Institute for Media, Languages and Culture, Aberystwyth University.

Damrosch, David. 2003. What Is World Literature? Princeton: Princeton University Press.

D’hulst, Lieven. 2010. “Translation History.” In Handbook of Translation Studies, edited by Yves Gambier and Luc van Doorslaer, 1: 397–405. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/hts.1.tra5.

Even-Zohar, Itamar. 1978. “The Position of Translated Literature within the Literary Polysystem.” In Literature and Translation: New Perspectives in Literary Studies, edited by James S. Holmes, José Lambert, and Raymond van den Broeck, 117–27. Leuven: Acco.

Heilbron, Johan. 1999. “Towards a Sociology of Translation: Book Translations as a Cultural World-System.” European Journal of Social Theory 2 (4): 429–44. https://doi.org/10.1177/136843199002004002.

—. 2000. “Translation as a Cultural World System.” Perspectives 8 (1): 9–26. https://doi.org/10.1080/0907676X.2000.9961369.

Heilbron, Johan, and Gisèle Sapiro. 2018. “Politics of Translation: How States Shape Cultural Transfers.” In Literary Translation and Cultural Mediators in ‘Peripheral’ Cultures, edited by Diana Roig-Sanz and Reine Meylaerts, 183–208. Cham: Springer International. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78114-3_7.

Laviosa, Sara. 2018. “English and Translation.” In The Routledge Handbook of English Language Studies, edited by Philip Seargeant, Ann Hewings, and Stephen Pihlaja, 447–60. London: Routledge.

MacKenzie, Ian. 2018. Language Contact and the Future of English. Routledge Studies in Sociolinguistics 18. New York: Routledge.

O’Sullivan, Carol. 2012. “Introduction: Rethinking Methods in Translation History.” Translation Studies 5 (2): 131–38. https://doi.org/10.1080/14781700.2012.663594.

Pandey, Anjali. 2016. Monolingualism and Linguistic Exhibitionism in Fiction. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.

Parks, Tim. 2015. Where I’m Reading from: The Changing World of Books. New York Review Books Collections. New York: New York Review Books.

Poupaud, Sandra, Anthony Pym, and Ester Torres Simón. 2009. “Finding Translations. On the Use of Bibliographical Databases in Translation History.” Meta: Journal Des Traducteurs / Meta: Translators’ Journal 54 (2): 264–78. https://doi.org/10.7202/037680ar.

Pym, Anthony. 2014. Method in Translation History. London: Routledge.

Pym, Anthony, and Grzegorz Chrupała. 2005. “The Quantitative Analysis of Translation Flows in the Age of an International Language.” In Less Translated Languages, edited by Albert Branchadell and Lovell Margaret West, 27–38. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/btl.58.03pym.

Sapiro, Gisèle. 2010. “Globalization and Cultural Diversity in the Book Market: The Case of Literary Translations in the US and in France.” Poetics 38 (4): 419–39. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.poetic.2010.05.001.

—. 2016. “How Do Literary Works Cross Borders (or Not)?” Journal of World Literature 1 (1): 81–96. https://doi.org/10.1163/24056480-00101009.

Segnini, Elisa. 2017. “Local Flavour vs Global Readerships: The Elena Ferrante Project and Translatability.” The Italianist 37 (1): 100–118. https://doi.org/10.1080/02614340.2016.1273649.

—. 2018. “Andrea Camilleri’s Montalbano and Elena Ferrante’s L’amica geniale: The Afterlife of Two ‘Glocal’ Series.” The Translator: 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/13556509.2018.1502607.

Thompson, John B. 2010. Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge: Polity.

Venuti, Lawrence. 2008. The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. 2nd ed. London: Routledge.

Zhou, Xiaoyan, and Sanjun Sun. 2017. “Bibliography-Based Quantitative Translation History.” Perspectives 25 (1): 98–119. https://doi.org/10.1080/0907676X.2016.1177100.