Abstract
Market forces privilege the translation of English fiction and poetry into other languages, and thus pose a danger for the accumulation of capital in the form of literature. A variety of source languages in translations makes literary capital more valuable as such. Further, the importance of writing in English in order to reach a world audience lowers the pool of talent capable of contributing to literature. The paper starts with a model of the world publishing market that explains why the dominant language acquires a disproportionate share of translations. Then the reasoning proceeds from theory to the empirical evidence. © 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 193-215 |
| Number of pages | 23 |
| Journal | Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization |
| Volume | 64 |
| Issue number | 2 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Oct 2007 |
Keywords
- English dominance
- Externalities
- Language
- Publishing
- Translation
- Welfare