ABSTRACT
It is an incontrovertible fact that English language readers are not very comfortable with translations. The percentage of published translations, at well under five per cent in Britain or the United States, is minute compared to the percentages of other European nations, where translated works can account for over 50 per cent of the book market. It is not uncommon for the name of an English translator to be printed in much smaller type than the name of the original author, or sometimes omitted altogether. In the theatre, it has long been acceptable for monolingual playwrights to be billed as having ‘translated’ a play by Chekhov or Brecht or Sophocles, and the justification for this practice is that they work from a so-called ‘literal translation’ which is then rewritten for performance. Perhaps most significant of all, however, is the absence of other contemporary literatures from British and American bookshops and review pages, an absence highlighted periodically when a writer who does not work in English wins the Nobel Prize for Literature and turns out to be all but unknown in the English-speaking world.
