Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - Apricale (The impact of literary translation funding on the transnational mobility of minor European literatures.)

Teaser

This project investigates the impact of national and international funding of translations in smaller European countries. Cultural and book industry in Europe faces major challenges in the 21th century, including the globalisation of the English cultural production that makes...

Summary

This project investigates the impact of national and international funding of translations in smaller European countries. Cultural and book industry in Europe faces major challenges in the 21th century, including the globalisation of the English cultural production that makes it first and often the only choice for translation by many publishers across all European countries. This is despite rich domestic European production in a variety of languages and a potential of sharing a European cultural heritage. There is a range of reasons for that. English production is easy to find a good and affordable translator for in every country, the production gets media attention due to coordinated publishing across the globe, English and American publishers have a well-developed network of literary agents and more. The issue of “anglo-globalisation” – a new name for the phenomenon – is ever more pressing in smaller European countries that hardly profit from the economies of scale and tend to focus on global bestsellers as safe bets.

Both individual countries and the European Union are fully aware of the unfavourable conditions for and in smaller European countries and try to compensate for these through a number of translation support programmes that subsidise both the production and promotion of translations of quality literature. But do these incentives actually work? How do they change the current book industry patterns unfavourable to smaller literatures, marginalised topics and cultures? Do they contribute to sharing the European cultural heritage, support cultural diversity and enable fair access to cultural goods from all around Europe?

The objective of this project is to investigate how external funding may or may not influence the decisions taken by acquisition editors, the key gatekeepers of publishing business, when choosing literature for translation. How do acquisition editors in publishing houses in smaller European countries choose books for translation? Why do they choose the books they choose from other smaller European countries, if any at all? How does the funding that the source country or European Union may provide impact their decision? How have the decision-making processes changed over the past decades as a result of non-literary factors such as the collapse of the Iron Curtain and ongoing globalisation?

Work performed

Drawing upon an analysis of archival, statistical and secondary sources, a hypothesis was proposed regarding a paradigm shift from a demand-driven literary circulation set-up to a supply-driven model. This was traced first using data on the early schemes of translation support (including intergovernmental agreements, League of Nations plans, minutes recording the internal discussion at ministries of foreign affairs, publishers’ and editors’ correspondence) as they were proposed and put into operation in the early 20th century and later in the 1950s and 1960s.

Further on, this hypothesis was tested and reconsidered based on the quantitative and qualitative research on the impact of funding since the 1970s. Data on the international circulation of literature within a pool of smaller European countries were collected. The resulting patterns were matched with historical perspective, focusing on the developments in connection with four major aspects: a) macro-historical events. i.e. Cold War and its end, EU enlargement, b) introduction of institutionalised translation funding schemes in across Europe, c) genre variation, d) individual source country/literature profiling in the international literary space.

Subsequently, qualitative research was carried out using semi-structured interviews with acquisition editors in the respective countries. The quantitative results were used to detect the most important publishers of literature translated from non-central literatures in each respective country. The interviews were analysed in order to understand the patterns of decision making processes in various types of publishing houses.

Overview of the results:
The results include four conference presentations, three public engagement events, four organised conferences and conference panels, six academic papers and chapters in books, and two events for professional audiences.

Exploitation of results
Conference presentations provide feedback from the academic community, especially at the early stages of the project, they boost networking and collaborations.

Public engagement activities helped to spread the word about the issues of translation funding and international literary circulation and get in touch with lay audiences as well as prospective students of humanities and digital humanities. The discussions with lay and semi-professional audiences were highly successful and generated further activities with both public engagement and policy-making aspects.

Conference and panel organisation helped to establish the researcher as a leader in two interconnected fields: sociology of contemporary translation and digital humanities in translation studies. It also contributed to presenting the research in the context of similarly positioned research into translation as a sociological and digital humanities topic.

Academic papers are the most important academic results that will stay to be exploited in the future by the academic community.

Throughout the project, the research was exploited by the professional publishing community, somewhat disproportionately evidenced by only two tangible results. The field work (contacting and interviewing publishers and editors) proved unexpectedly important to the informants (apart from the researcher). They welcomed such comparative and in-depth research into a field they often considered neglected.

Final results

This project shed new light on the practice of international literary circulation in smaller European countries, especially in relation to public funding of literary translations and their promotion. While some earlier studies explored literary circulation in large countries, a comprehensive comparative study was not available. This project contribute to the understanding of the key changes of the publishing environment since the end of the WWII, and especially since the end of the Cold War.

While European literary circulation was largely driven by demand on the target side up until the end of the first world war, it gradually shifted toward a system integrated instance of supply-driven translation compensation of lack of demand on the target side, especially with regard to literary export from smaller and peripheral European countries. The supply-driven model, however, proved highly inefficient as it did not respond to the need and wished of the target audiences. In the wake of globalisation pressures and the collapse of the Communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe, it was replaced by a model that favours greater cooperation between the source and target side, between the funder (usually the source country or a supranational body such as the EU) and the receiver (translator, usually represented by the target country publisher).

Understanding the decision-making processes in publishing and the role of external funding in smaller European courtiers will contribute to a more efficient design of subsidies and cultural programmes and – ultimately – to a richer experience of the shared European culture as well as mutual international understanding and pan-European social cohesion.