Who decides which types of books are funded and translated, and which are not?

The international publication of literature doesn't depend solely on the talent of writers, the literary quality of their works or the spontaneous interest of readers. It's conditioned by grants, policy, cultural institutions, publishers, literary agents, book fairs and strategies for cultural diplomacy and globalization. This is to be the focus of the international conference on Cultural Diversity and Funded Translations: Between Institutional Gatekeeping and the Market, Past and Present to be held from 20 to 22 April at the UOC in Barcelona. It is being organized by the Trad-Divers project and the GlobaLS group at the UOC-TRÀNSIC research centre, in association with the Spanish National Research Council's Institute of Language, Literature and Anthropology (ILLA-CSIC).

The fundamental question is who decides what gets translated and distributed internationally. The organizers start from a clear premise: translation is not a neutral process but a form of mediation between the state, or any other governmental framework, and the market, in which institutions, the publishing industry and the reading public intervene. From that perspective, translation not only transfers texts from one language to another, but also organizes cultural hierarchies, amplifies certain voices and excludes others or makes them invisible.

Translation as cultural policy

Grants for translations are often presented as ways to support culture, but their role goes well beyond that. They also form part of the process to create literary value, symbolic capital and international visibility. These programmes have become key players in the dissemination of national literature. The research to be presented shows how governments, public bodies and other non-state actors influence what is published and translated in the international market.

For Diana Roig-Sanz, ICREA researcher and coordinator of Trad-Divers, together with Laura Fólica, the objective is to analyse the legitimizing mechanisms that determine the consecration of some works rather than others. "We want to study the mechanisms involved in the consecration of literature and determine which agents – publishers, translators, literary agents, book fairs, festivals and national cultural institutes – play a role in that process." She added that translation policies also operate as tools for soft power that help to build a country's brand abroad. Trad-Divers studies the relationship between translation, diversity and literary circulation in Latin America, with an approach that combines global literary studies, the sociology of translation, international relations and digital humanities methodologies.

Translation and soft power

Translation is a form of cultural diplomacy, as the organizers of the conference, together with Lucia Campanella and Elisabet Carbó, have demonstrated in their work. The presentations explicitly demonstrate how grant-funded translations contribute to the construction of a country brand and help to strengthen a nation's soft power. It's not just about exporting books: languages, a canon of authors and works, cultural frameworks and certain types of capital are also exported. In over-politicized regimes, these policies also operate in an ambiguous area between cultural legitimacy and propaganda, precisely because public funding plays a part in the circulation of texts, and can benefit certain authors and titles over others.

That geopolitical and cultural dimension is reflected in the programme. It brings together researchers from a wide range of countries who will give talks on translation programmes in Africa and the Middle East, translation as a tool for cultural diplomacy in Tunisia, the institutional governance of translation in Egypt, grants from the Spanish Ministry of Culture, bibliodiversity in Latin America and the relationship between literature, literary agents and public funding. Far from being an abstract debate, the conference will examine specific cases that show how the circulation of literature is organized on different scales, the mechanisms that provide legitimacy and prestige, and the power networks that seek to increase cultural and publishing influence abroad.

What kind of diversity do funded translations actually promote?

The second issue to be examined will be the type of cultural diversity that institutions are fostering. The conference will not limit itself to studying the institutions that fund translations but also aims to find out what kind of diversity these organizations support. The researchers attending will analyse the extent to which translation policies encourage or limit bibliodiversity, linguistic diversity and the visibility of minority or smaller languages, the presence of queer authors, and the circulation of works that fall outside the main commercial markets.

The approach is based on an uncomfortable truth: all grant policies explicitly or implicitly define what type of books are funded for translation and what works are excluded from that support. And not only literary criteria come into play here, but also market forces, state priorities regarding privileged geopolitical areas, ideological frameworks and structural inequalities. The conference's call for papers expressly mentions the need to examine which kinds of writers benefit from grants, which are excluded, and what relationship exists between the diversity advocated by institutions and that favoured, for commercial reasons, by the publishing market.

Minority languages, gender diversity and bibliodiversity

The programme organizes these questions into specific panels that will discuss translation and gender diversity in Ibero-America, feminist self-translation, bibliodiversity in the Latin American context, and translation programmes linked to minority or smaller languages. Also included are studies of the place of Yiddish in funded programmes, institutional mediation in relation to Mapuche literature, and tensions between the market and institutions in the promotion of different languages and literary traditions.

For Laura Virginia Fólica, a researcher at ILLA-CSIC and co-director of the project, this field of study allows us to determine more rigorously to what extent cultural diversity is a real practice or an empty label. Together with Roig-Sanz, she argues that the aim is to produce knowledge about literary circulation from a more plural, democratic and inclusive perspective, taking into account not only the works themselves, but also the institutional and economic structures that determine their international visibility.

In this context, the conference welcomes specialists such as Adan Kovacsics, translator into Spanish of the 2025 Nobel laureate László Krasznahorkai; Simona Škrabec, PhD in comparative literature from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona; Gustavo Sorá, a CONICET researcher specializing in book fairs; José Diego González, coordinator of the Regional Centre for the Promotion of Books in Latin America and Caribbean (CERLALC), and Diana Roig-Sanz herself, a specialist in the international circulation of literature and translation policies. The programme also includes keynote talks by Reine Meylaerts, Beatriz Barreiro Carril and Alejandro Dujovne, as well as round tables with publishers including Galaxia and Tigre de Paper, and literary agents such as María Cardona.

The importance of this debate goes beyond the academic sphere. At a time marked by disputes over identity, inequality, representation and setbacks in inclusion policies, translation seems to be another field where decisions are made about which cultures are visible, which voices acquire legitimacy and which stories manage to cross borders. The global distribution of literature is not spontaneous. It is, to a large extent, the result of a chain of institutional, economic and symbolic decisions that need to be put under the spotlight. 

Conference programme: Cultural Diversity and Funded Translations: Between Institutional Gatekeeping and the Market, Past and Present

This event contributes to UN Sustainable Development Goals 5 and 10 on Gender Equality and Reduced Inequalities, and aligns with the UOC's research mission on Culture for a critical society.