Novel Translations

Many early novels were cosmopolitan books, read from London to Leipzig and beyond, available in nearly simultaneous translations into French, English, German, and other European languages. In Novel Translations, Bethany Wiggin charts just one of the paths by which newness—in its avatars as fashion, novelties, and the novel—entered the European world in the decades around 1700. As readers across Europe snapped up novels, they domesticated the genre. Across borders, the novel lent readers everywhere a suggestion of sophistication, a familiarity with circumstances beyond their local ken. Into the eighteenth century, the modern German novel was not German at all; rather, it was French, as suggested by Germans' usage of the French word Roman to describe a wide variety of genres: pastoral romances, war and travel chronicles, heroic narratives, and courtly fictions. Carried in large part on the coattails of the Huguenot diaspora, these romans, nouvelles, amours secrets, histoires galantes, and histories scandaleuses shaped German literary culture to a previously unrecognized extent. Wiggin contends that this French chapter in the German novel's history began to draw to a close only in the 1720s, more than sixty years after the word first migrated into German. Only gradually did the Roman go native; it remained laden with the baggage from its "French" origins even into the nineteenth century.

******************* "Grey, elemental affinity, zero" The Elder announced the result loudly On hearing this, it was like a bolt of lightning struck Grey, he stood there dumbfounded and just stared at the Elder. Shocked voices could be heard from the people and there was some which were also filled with scorn. Grey stood dazed amidst all the noises without any reactions. One word was constantly reverberating in his head, 'How?'. 'Why, why did this happen to me?' Grey asked himself over and over again **************** Unbeknownst to Grey, something greater lies in wait in his body.... *************** Check out the book, leave a review after reading, and also your powerstones. Hope you enjoy this, and Thanks for reading ^_^ P.S: When I started this book I had zero writing experience, so the first chapters aren't that great, although, my writing quality has improved over time. Also, English isn't my first language, so there are some instances where my choice of words are not good enough for what I'm trying to portray. A heads up, the book will be using a medieval setting. My world building is not the best, but it gets better over time, so bear with me on the early chapters! P.S: Cover art not mine I just edited it. If you're the owner and want me to take it down you can notify me.

"I am not perfect." It came out in a rush of breath. "See I thought I was. Thank God I ain't. See a perfect thing ain't got a chance. The world kills it, everything perfect. (Listen to him!) Now see a thing that ain't perfect, it grows like a weed. Yeah, like a weed! A thing that ain't perfect gets hand clapping, smiles, takes the wire an easy winner. But the world ain't set up right if you perfect. You lible to run right into a brick wall. Looks like suicide. All the weeds say, looka there, it suicide!"

Increases in the stock of ideas possessed by societies are central to modern economic growth. The implications of idea flows are striking: Klenow and Rodriguez-Clare (2005) estimate world production would be just 6% of its current level if countries did not share ideas. Yet, although theoretical economists have studied ideas and their diffusion extensively, empirical studies are scarce because ideas are inherently difficult to measure. Previous empirical studies of idea flows have tended to use proxies such as trade flows, foreign direct investment, migration, and patent citations. However, with the exception of the latter, these measures are not pure idea flows, and do not capture the key properties of ideas, namely non-rivalry and disembodiedness. My research proposes a novel measure of idea flows, namely book translations, and uses it to study the factors that affect the international diffusion of ideas. Book translations are an attractive way to quantify idea flows because they are both non-rival and disembodied; they are a pure measure of idea flows rather than a by-product of a process such as trade or migration, and their key purpose is to make the ideas contained in the book accessible to speakers of another language. In chapter 2, I outline the economics literature on ideas and their diffusion. I motivate and discuss book translations as a measure of idea flows, and provide a framework for thinking about when translations are likely to occur. I describe the translation data in chapter 3. The source of the data is an international bibliography of translations collected by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization. From this bibliography, I compile a data set of over 2 million translations published in 80 countries since the 1949, including detailed information on each title translated. I then document the main patterns of translation flows. In chapter 4, I employ a gravity framework to study how distance affects translation flows between countries. This sheds light both on the barriers to international idea diffusion and on the underlying causes of the negative relationship between distance and trade. Translations differ from trade in that they have zero transportation costs, but they are subject to similar search and information costs and costs of forming contracts. I estimate a gravity model where bilateral translation flows vary with the sizes of the countries and the distance between them, and find the elasticity of translations with respect to distance to be between -0.3 and -0.5 for the 1990s; these values are significantly smaller than the equivalent elasticity for trade found in the literature, suggesting a significant role for transportation costs in the distance effect on trade. In addition, I present several pieces of evidence that suggest supply-side frictions play a larger role in the distance effect on translations than do consumer preferences. For instance, the speed with which titles are translated, which is likely to largely capture supply frictions as opposed to demand factors, decreases significantly with distance. Finally, in joint work with Ran Abramitzky (chapter 5), I study how the collapse of the Communist regime in Eastern Europe at the close of the 1980s affected the international diffusion of ideas. We show that while translations between Communist languages decreased by two thirds with the collapse, Western-to-Communist translations increased by a factor of seven and reached Western levels. Convergence was full in economically-beneficial fields such as sciences and only partial in culturally-beneficial fields such as history. The effects were larger for more Western-oriented countries. These findings help us understand how institutions shape the international diffusion of knowledge and demonstrate the importance of preferences in determining the type of ideas that diffuse into a country.

San Guo Yan Yi is one of the best-known classic Chinese novels in the English-speaking world. The earliest English translation came out in 1820, while a range of further translations have been produced over the past two hundred years. How do the different versions relate to each other? This volume examines the intertextual relations between the English translations of San Guo Yan Yi. Intertextuality refers to the interdependence of texts in relation to one another. Focusing on the perspectives of impact, quotation, parallels and transformation, the author compares a range of the translated versions, including two full-length translations and over twenty excerpted renderings and partial adaptations since the 1820s. She discovers that excerpted translations are selected to fit the translators’ own narrations, and are adapted to many genres, such as poetry, drama, fairytales, and textbooks. Moreover, the original text, translated texts and other related English works are interconnected in one large network, for which intertextuality offers an ideal basis for research. Students and scholars of Chinese literature and translation studies will benefit from this book.

Ian McEwan: "This is a brilliant and extremely useful guide, approachable on every level. Boyd Tonkin opens up infinite worlds of the imagination." (quote for front cover) Following the great success of the hardcover edition of Boyd Tonkin's 100 Best Novels in Translation, Galileo is very happy to announce a trade paperback edition. The author was Literary Editor of The Independent newspaper and started the prestigious Independent Foreign Fiction Prize which ran from 1990 until 2015 before becoming part of the Man Booker awards. He has made an extraordinary selection of 'classics' ranging from the well known authors such as Proust, Dostoyevsky, Sartre, Cervantes, Nabokov, Marquez, Kundera etc, to name just a handful, to lesser known, but no less deserving, authors writing in languages from every corner of the earth. For each selection he has written a commentary on the plot and theme of the work concerned, as well as writing about the merits of the particular translation(s) into the English language. The works are arranged in date order of publication, and are not ranked in any other way. The result is a rich tapestry of the best fiction from around the world that will surely accelerate the recent trend towards a more outward looking approach to what we read. It is both a work of reference but as importantly a book that can read from cover to cover with huge enjoyment.

Translated fiction has largely been under-theorized, if not altogether ignored, in literary studies. Though widely consumed, translated novels are still considered secondary versions of foreign masterpieces. Readers, Reading and Reception of Translated Fiction in Chinese recognizes that translated novels are distinct from non-translated novels, just as they are distinct from the originals from which they are derived, but they are neither secondary nor inferior. They provide different models of reality; they are split apart by two languages, two cultures and two literary systems; and they are characterized by cultural hybridity, double voicing and multiple intertextualities. With the continued popularity of translated fiction, questions related to its reading and reception take on increasing significance. Chan draws on insights from textual and narratological studies to unravel the processes through which readers interact with translated fiction. Moving from individual readings to collective reception, he considers how lay Chinese readers, as a community, 'received' translated British fiction at specific historical moments during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Case studies discussed include translations of stream-of-consciousness novels, fantasy fiction and postmodern works. In addition to lay readers, two further kinds of reader with bilingual facility are examined: the way critics and historians approach translated fiction is investigated from structuralist and poststrcuturalist perspectives. A range of novels by well-known British authors constitute the core of the study, including novels by Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, John Fowles, Helen Fielding and J.K. Rowling.