The economics of literary translation: some theory and evidence

Books are an important factor of cultural transmission, but often need to be translated to achieve this goal. English is sometimes accused of dominating in terms of translations.We develop a theoretical model,which is estimated using UNESCO translation data. We show that if account is taken of factors such as production in the source and the destination languages, as well as distances between cultures, then translations from English are surpassed in relative terms by translations from other idioms, including Scandinavian languages and French; their position as destination of literary translations is however fairly weak