The initial essay of this blog on Translation (and the decrease in translations globally) found a nice and critical echo from imomus who – from his perspective: correctly – pointed to the fact that those statistics that illustrate the paramount predominance of English just mirror a classical network and hypernode scheme (one hub – English [...]

Myself? At the Salon du Livre,I picked up a rather exotic reader (of ‘editions errance’) “La culture est-elle naturelle?” (“Is Culture Natural?”), reflecting about recent research in early (paleolithic and neolithic) human culture. I was puzzled that Actes Sud who obviously acquired or distributes that series considered it useful to carry 3 copies of such [...]

It’s a book fair. But most people line up – for someone drawing and painting often entire pages, in ink and bright colour! Getting back from Paris and the Salon du Livre, happy to have survived aisles jammed by endless cohorts of youth lining up for their favorite comic book stars, I still have a [...]

Bestsellers in Europe are strange these days. Since fall 2005, or for 78 weeks in a row, a novel about two learned men of the 18th century topped all the lists in Germany.  Last year in France, where traditions count probably more then anything else in culture, a book written by an American writer (in [...]

or, Why translation matters. Oddly enough, globalisation (and the internet) brought, as for books, not many more translations from all those books from all over the world. Quite the opposite has happened. The number of translated books has declined continuously in most countries since the mid 1990s, and that is not only true for those [...]