Economics of Literary Translation. A Simple Theory and Evidence

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 of English. 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 in English with increasing frequency) 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.Languages, Translations, Cultural and Linguistic Distances

Are Remakes Doing as Well as Originals? A note.

This paper compares originals and remakes from the standpoint of artistic quality and financial return. It appears that on average remakes are of lower quality and have smaller financial returns than originals.

Economics of literary translation : A simple theory and evidence

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 thepopulation 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.languages, translations, cultural and linguistic distances

De la narration à la consécration

Nous nous proposons d’illustrer comment s’est formé au fil du temps le « panthéon » actuel des grands représentants de la peinture flamande de Van Eyck à Rubens. Pour explorer ce processus dynamique, nous suivons à travers quatre siècles (de 1604 à 1996) les écrits d’un corpus d’historiens qui ont jeté un regard à vocation exhaustive sur la peinture de cette époque. Nous montrons que plus de la moitié des artistes classés parmi les premiers aujourd’hui l’étaient déjà du temps de Karel van Mander (1604) et de Joachim von Sandrart (1675). La plupart des autres artistes sont entrés dans ce répertoire suite à la reconnaissance, grâce aux recherches des historiens et aux réattributions, de qualités omises par leurs prédécesseurs. Il est rare que des artistes soient simplement découverts, ou qu’ils entrent dans le répertoire à la lumière d’œuvres créées par des artistes qui leur ont succédé.We illustrate how today’s canon of Flemish painters from Van Eyck to Rubens gradually took shape in the course of time. To explore this dynamic process, we collected data on the presence of a large number of artists in narrative works written by important art scholars at time intervals of roughly 75 years between 1604 and 1996. We show that Karel Van Mander (in 1604) and Joachim von Sandrart (in 1675) had already recognized more than half of the now top-ranking artists. Most of the other artists were added to the canon when, thanks to the research of art historians, they were discovered and attributed qualities that had been previously overlooked (traditionalism). It is a rare occurrence that artists are discovered or added to the canon in the light of works created by other artists who have followed them (revisionism)

Persistence and fashion in art Italian Renaissance from Vasari to Berenson and beyond

In his Vite (1568), Giorgio Vasari systematically describes the lives and works of some 250 painters from the Italian Renaissance. This paper focuses on the survival of these artists’ reputations in the past four centuries. The length of the entries in seven famous art histories written between 1550 and 1996 is used as a proxy to measure these reputations. Though some artists appear, disappear or reappear, there is a surprisingly large degree of consensus over time: among the first 50 to whom scholars devote space, one half is recognized at all times. This observation is sustained by several statistical tests, which all confirm this view for the 250 artists discussed in the paper: their rankings are strongly correlated over time. The dataset does not permit to decide whether this is due to the aesthetic quality attributed to artists (or their works), or to the social consensus that has built around them

Comparing artistic values: the example of movies

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Quantitative approaches to valuation in the arts

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"Persistence and fashion in art. Italian Renaissance from Vasari to Berenson and beyond" (vol 34, pg 24, 2006)

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Persistence and fashion in art: the Italian Renaissance from Vasari to Berenson and beyond

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishe