Of centers and peripheries: Explaining the macro-structure of book translation flows in Europe

This study analyzes the exchange of book translations between countries. Existing research is split over the question of whether translation flows are driven by literary, economic, political, or cultural factors. The forces that stratify countries into centers and peripheries are thus debated. To advance the debate, this study leverages newly collected data on N = 147,443 translations of literary works to reconstruct the network of translation flows between 32 European countries for the time period from 2018 to 2020. The relative impacts of literary prestige, economic infrastructure, state support, and cultural proximity on translation flows are estimated with Generalized Additive Models and the Quadratic Assignment Procedure. Results indicate that translation flows are best explained by a combination of literary prestige and economic infrastructure. Translations flow from countries with high literary prestige and a strong publishing infrastructure to countries with little prestige and weak infrastructure. The transnational circulation of literature appears as a game in which economic infrastructure confers power and in which the accumulation of literary prestige is the ultimate stake. This suggests a logic of competition in which translations are the medium through which economic power is converted into symbolic recognition. In this view, the market logic and the artistic logic are not contradictory orientations but different steps in ongoing accumulation processes. Although these conclusions are specific to the European literary field, they document a novel viewpoint that is not reducible to established arguments that point to either convergence or divergence of art and commerce.