Publishing Perspectives has an editorial by Burton Pike in which he considers Cultural Homogeneity and the Future of Literary Translation -- arguing that:
It's obviously a concern -- though I think there are still counteracting forces at work in many other languages/cultures. Though of course often that isn't the stuff that gets translated into English .....
See also Chad Post's mention at Three Percent, Intriguing Questions about Translation and Culture.
A creeping homogenization is developing in prose fiction, a kind of generic international content and style that transcends national borders.Among the possible consequences:
But what if writers and readers no longer think that the surface of a literary text conceals layered depths that the translator must labor to transmit ? What if translation is no longer thought of as an art but as piece-work ?This isn't a new concern, of course. For example, in his pieces at The New York Review of Books weblog Tim Parks has pointed to this phenomenon -- of an increasingly English-language (and especially American-culture) dominated world literature -- see, for example, his The Dull New Global Novel.
It's obviously a concern -- though I think there are still counteracting forces at work in many other languages/cultures. Though of course often that isn't the stuff that gets translated into English .....
See also Chad Post's mention at Three Percent, Intriguing Questions about Translation and Culture.