Challenging the European Monoculture: Towards a Policy on the Diversification of the European Literary Field.

Readers do not restrict themselves to literature from their own culture, written in their own language. Their literary consumption often contains books that were originally written in another language. This is especially true for so called ‘minor languages’ (in a European perspective), like Hungarian or Dutch. At the same time a ‘central language’, like English imports far less foreign books and English readers are less frequently confronted with foreign literature. Indeed, the translation flows of literary books depend on linguistic power relations (that in their turn depend on political and economic power relations).The production process of translated literature is much more complex than that of literature written in a native language: it involves more actors, costs more money and effort. In this project, we want to consider the trajectory of translated books in Europe and focus on the actors and institutions involved in bringing translated literature on the European market(s): translators, editors, literary agents, the government, organisations, book fairs, literary festivals and prizes, critics. Although minor literatures import more and export less, they do manage to occupy a place in the European literary market. Within the entire network of actors and institutions involved we want to give special attention to government-related funding, as one of the main factors in the literary export. We expect those institutions to act as promoters for their own literature, to brand their own literature and to try and influence the field of translation flows to their benefit.We will take the Flemish and Hungarian case as an example to see how the international book circulation works for smaller literatures. We will look at how they relate to each other (Flemish to Hungarian, Hungarian to Flemish) and how they relate to the most dominant language worldwide, English (Flemish to English, Hungarian to English). We will then use this case to set up a larger project that 1) involves more European literatures and 2) focuses on more actors and institutions. Our goal is to 1) map and analyse translation flows in a scientific way and 2) to help policy makers in the cultural field to optimize their initiatives.

Keywords:Translation Policy, European Culture, Translation

Disciplines:Literary studies, Theory and methodology of language studies, Theory and methodology of literary studies