期刊名称：CORE Discussion Papers / Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (UCL), Louvain
出版年度：2007
卷号：1
出版社：Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (UCL), Louvain
摘要：Books are an important factor of cultural transmission, but need, in most cases, to be translated.
According to some authors, this may lead to a form of cultural domination, in particular of
English, on other languages. All these papers ignore that the population speaking English as a
first language is, with the exception of Mandarin, the largest in the world. It is therefore not
surprising that English produces more fiction (and much more scientific literature, as scientists
from all countries write more and more in English) than any other language. We develop a
theoretical model of translation, which is estimated on the basis of UNESCO translation data.
We show that translations from English are dominated by translations from other languages,
including Scandinavian ones and French.
关键词：languages, translations, cultural and linguistic distances
