Last week I mentioned/discussed Dalya Alberge's report in The Observer on how (supposedly) British readers lost in translations as foreign literature sales boom, and at Quill & Quire they follow up on that article, wondering: Books in translation take off in the U.K.; can they do the same in Canada ?
The Canadian situation is somewhat different from the UK one, since Canada is, after all, (nominally) bilingual (yes, yes, the UK is nominally multilingual, but let's face it: French in Canada is ,,, non-trivial; Welsh, Scots, etc, in the UK ... sadly, considerably more trivial (though of course not entirely so)). Interestingly, the focus of the Quill & Quire piece is on translation (into English) from the French. It makes sense, in a way -- translations from other languages into English are most likely to reach the relatively small Canadian market via US and UK editions/translations Still, smaller markets can take the occasional lead here -- as I recently noted, Uday Prakash's The Walls of Delhi came to the US only after the University of Western Australia published it ..... And in Canada, they do have admirable publishers such as Biblioasis, which has taken the lead in some unlikely areas/languages.
The Canadian situation is somewhat different from the UK one, since Canada is, after all, (nominally) bilingual (yes, yes, the UK is nominally multilingual, but let's face it: French in Canada is ,,, non-trivial; Welsh, Scots, etc, in the UK ... sadly, considerably more trivial (though of course not entirely so)). Interestingly, the focus of the Quill & Quire piece is on translation (into English) from the French. It makes sense, in a way -- translations from other languages into English are most likely to reach the relatively small Canadian market via US and UK editions/translations Still, smaller markets can take the occasional lead here -- as I recently noted, Uday Prakash's The Walls of Delhi came to the US only after the University of Western Australia published it ..... And in Canada, they do have admirable publishers such as Biblioasis, which has taken the lead in some unlikely areas/languages.