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Anglo-American hegemony is a common trend in the cultural content sectors, and music, films, and television series are all facing the same phenomenon: a dominance of English content and the resultant difficulty of enabling content in other languages to cross borders. The AngloAmerican book sector can rely on comparative advantages:
a large ‘domestic’ market of 500 million native speakers and many more non-native readers who can read directly in English,
a large and diverse ‘production’ capacity, the efficiency of the US and the UK publishing sectors in identifying, publishing
and promoting books, and helping authors to create their worldwide network/presence,
a large network of competent translators who can translate into nearly all target languages worldwide. Many European publishers are willing to bring more linguistic and cultural diversity into the European literature scene, and can rely on committed partners (writers, translators, booksellers, book fairs literary festivals, libraries, etc.), but public funding intervention at national and European levels is needed to help the book value chain overcome the linguistic, cultural and market barriers preventing European books from travelling more easily across Europe.
02.1 | Funding models Funding organisations act as honest brokers between cultures. They play a pivotal role between the translators and publishers in the target territory, and the authors and publishers in the source territory. Right across Europe, different types of organisations award translation grants to publishers in order to promote their national literature(s) abroad. The most common types of organisation are the following:
government ministries (a division that formulates policy and awards translation grants, e.g. as in Croatia),
non-governmental national agencies that are funded indirectly by government (e.g. Literature Ireland or the Estonian Literature Centre),
multipartner entities such as the public– private partnership Traduki, which operates between the German-speaking countries
(Austria, Germany, Liechtenstein and Switzerland) and south-east Europe, as well as within the south-east European countries,
larger arts or literature funding bodies (e.g. the Swedish Arts Council and the Centre National du Livre in France),
other cultural networks and institutions (the Goethe Institute). Apart from awarding translation grants to promote their national literature(s), the larger and more established funders also often provide the following services.
Policy and representation :
they inform or formulate national policy development in relation to international literature promotion and translation;
they act as a resource centre for the government, journalists, festival programmers, diplomats abroad, etc.
