Apricale · The impact of literary translation funding on the transnational mobility of minor European literatures.

The impact of literary translation funding on the transnational mobility of minor European literatures.

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?

Data: CORDIS, © European Union