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Conference : The contradictions of the globalisation of the publishing industry

Translations and editorial globalisation: the case of Italian literature in France

Author/s : Anaïs Bokobza

At the beginning of the 1980s, the number of translations and publications of Italian books in France increased considerably. Since then, even though the annual number of publications has gone through significant variations, the level has always remained higher than before the 1980s. This phenomenon raises different issues: firstly, the reasons why the French editorial world has shown such interest to Italian literature. Secondly, if there has been an increase of the overall number of translations into French, and if this increase reflects a more global transformation, which is usually referred to as cultural globalisation. Here, the manifestation of this process would be an acceleration of the rate of publications and translations. We will use a database that gathers all the literary translations of Italian into French between 1984 and 2002. We will compare the detailed statistical description of the evolution of the publications of translations from Italian to those from Spanish, German, Swedish and English, languages for which we have available similar databases. From this analysis, we will draw general trends in the recent transformations of the translations market in France. We propose to illustrate these conclusions by looking up the specificities of the representations of Italian literature and culture within the French editorial field. In this purpose, we will use historical analyses and, mostly, interviews conducted with different actors of this field – publishers, heads of collections, translators.

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