Reflection 13 Feb Brennan

"Most of the people doing translations, the presses are doing books that are complicated and unique and High Modernist things, and that people are saying are important, and so are looking for this rarified sort of book that only has a small readership to begin with."

This quote summed up for me the entire "problem" with English readers' engagement with translation, not only in the way we read, but also in the way we assess what is read. If translators want more English speakers to read their work, they need to pick work that English speakers will read. I wonder if the data takes into account the translation of manga into English; at least in the UK, it seems to be doing quite well: https://twitter.com/thebookseller/status/1525026174606491648?lang=en  Additionally, we need to take into account the presence of the internet and of self-translation. The global status of English means that English readers can be exposed to new ideas from all over the globe without ever reading a translation. Deutsche Welle and Al Jazeera are two high-profile examples of this, both producing in-depth news coverage originally in English. On the individual level, English readers on social media will encounter fluent English writers from all over the world, and will have direct access to their opinions.

"Whatever the success of a given educational system in promoting multilingualism, few people will master as many as three or four languages in their lifetimes, much less the 600 or so not currently endangered, or the 3,000 that are predicted to survive the contemporary mass extinction, so any defensiveness about reading literature in a language other than that which it was originally written is highly misguided."

Not sure what the author is trying to say here. First of all, not one person has ever suggested that the key to saving endangered languages is to make one person learn all 3000 of them. Second, creating an immersion environment for an endangered language absolutely requires a certain level of "defensiveness" so that the learners have real incentive to use the endangered language rather than the dominant language. (The joy of reading in the original language is one of the common motivations cited by learners of Latin and Ancient Greek, and those languages have long exceeded their natural lifespans on Earth.) Third, a large number of endangered languages do not have enough proficient speakers to generate a body of written work which can be translated into any language, let alone English. They don't have the opportunity to contribute to la république mondiale des lettres, and reap the benefits it supposedly provides. I don't get the impression that this author has actually engaged with any real language revitalization movement, or these things would be obvious. It disappoints me that this real issue is being used to prop up the argument for Even More English.