Economics of Literary Translation: A Simple Theory and Evidence
21 Pages Posted: 30 May 2008
Date Written: August 2007
Abstract
Books are an important factor of cultural transmission, but need, in most cases, to be translated. According to some authors, this may lead to a form of cultural domination, in particular of English, on other languages. All these papers ignore that the population speaking English as a first language is, with the exception of Mandarin, the largest in the world. It is therefore not surprising that English produces more fiction (and much more scientific literature, as scientists from all countries write more and more in English) than any other language. We develop a theoretical model of translation, which is estimated on the basis of UNESCO translation data. We show that translations from English are dominated by translations from other languages, including Scandinavian ones and French.
Keywords: cultural and linguistic distances, languages, translations
JEL Classification: L82, Z11
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation