The figure is remarkably stable for other major or central languages. Gisele Sapiro (“Globalization and Cultural Diversity in the Book Market,”
Poetics
38:4 [2010]: 419–39) logs forty-two source languages for literary translations published in France between 1984 and 2002. A relatively new American adventure in literary translation on the Web—
WordsWithoutBorders.org
—has widened the net to include more than seventy source languages, but it has yet to affect book publishing in traditional form to any significant degree.
For a brief exposition of the dollar delusion, see Michel Onfray’s article “Les deux bouts de la langue,”
Le Monde
, July 10, 2010.
Rasa’il Ikhwan al-Safa
(Cairo: al-Maktaba al-Tijariyya al-Kubra, 1928), III:152, quoted in Bernard Lewis,
From Babel to Dragomans: Interpreting the Middle East
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 31.
Katharina Rout, “Fragments of a Greater Language,” in
Beyond Words: Translating the World
, ed. Susan Ouriou (Banff, AB: Banff Center Press, 2010), 33–37.
Jessica Ka Yee Chan, “Translating Russia into China: Lu Xun’s Fashioning of an Antithesis to Western Europe,” paper given at the MLA Conference, Philadelphia, 2009.
Arnold B. McMillin, “Small Is Sometimes Beautiful: Studying ‘Minor Languages’ at a University with Particular Reference to Belarus,”
Modern Language Review
101:4 (October 2006): xxxii–xliii.
Anonymous editorial,
Yomiuri Shimbun
, June 23, 1888, translated by Michael Emmerich.
“The Wu Jing Project: A New Translation of the Five Chinese Classics into the Major Languages of the World; an International Project Sponsored by the Confucius Institute Headquarters, Beijing, China,” project description kindly supplied by Martin Kern.