IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/crs/wpaper/98-32.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

English -Language Dominance Literature and Welfare

Author

Listed:
  • Jacques Melitz

    (Crest)

Abstract

The tendency of a single world market to privilege the translation of English fiction and poetry into other languages for reading or listening enjoyment may damage the production of world literature and in this respect make us all worse off. In order to develop this thesis, the article begins with an economic model of the market for imaginative works in which translations are systematically concentrated on writings in the original language with the largest share in world sales. The model is then shown to agree with the facts. Next, it is argued that high concentration of translations on works coming from one particular language hurts the production of literature directly, because variety of languages of origin is enriching as such, and indirectly, because the concentration damages the incentives of those who do not write in the leading language to invest in their own talents. "Literature" in the paper refers to earlier production of imaginative works which represents capital or is still read.
(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)

Suggested Citation

  • Jacques Melitz, 1998. "English -Language Dominance Literature and Welfare," Working Papers 98-32, Center for Research in Economics and Statistics.
    • Handle: RePEc:crs:wpaper:98-32
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://crest.science/RePEc/wpstorage/1998-32.pdf
    File Function: Crest working paper version
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Melitz, Jacques, 2008. "Language and foreign trade," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 52(4), pages 667-699, May.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • E00 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - General - - - General
    • F00 - International Economics - - General - - - General

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:crs:wpaper:98-32. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Secretariat General (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/crestfr.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.