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Translation and the field of publishing

a
Gisèle Sapiro
a
CNRS, Centre de sociologie européenne, Paris, France
Version of record first published: 29 May 2008.

To cite this article: Gisèle Sapiro (2008): Translation and the field of publishing, Translation
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 Translation Studies,
Vol. 1, No. 2, 2008, 154
166

Translation and the field of publishing

A commentary on Pierre Bourdieu’s ‘‘A conservative revolution
in publishing’’
Gisèle Sapiro

CNRS, Centre de sociologie européenne, Paris, France

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A sociological approach to translation needs to take into account publishers, whose role
in the international circulation of books is crucial. This paper focuses on the
contribution of Bourdieu’s economy of symbolic goods and field theory to the sociology
of translation. The first section introduces Bourdieu’s article ‘‘A conservative revolution
in publishing’’ and more broadly his analysis of publishing. In the second section, I
propose three theoretical and methodological directions for enlarging Bourdieu’s model
to a global sociological analysis of the circulation of books in translation: firstly a
displacement from the national to the global market of translation; secondly a focus on
publisher’s strategy and booklist; and thirdly reception.
Keywords: translation; publishing; cultural exchanges; sociology of culture; sociology of
literature; sociology of translation

Publishers play a major role in the international circulation of books, in their original
language as well as in translation. A sociological approach to translation, considered as a
social practice, thus needs to take into account this category of agents. Despite some early
significant studies (Bourdieu 1977; Coser, Kadushin, and Powell 1982), the sociology of
publishing did not develop before the late 1990s, in contrast to the history of the book and,
more recently, the economics of the book market, which have become specialized domains.
In this paper, I will focus on the contribution of Bourdieu’s economy of symbolic goods
and field theory to the sociology of translation. The first section will introduce Bourdieu’s
analysis of publishing in general, and more specifically his article ‘‘A conservative
revolution in publishing’’ as presented in English translation in this issue. In the next
section, I will propose three theoretical and methodological directions for enlarging
Bourdieu’s model to a global sociological analysis of the circulation of books in
translation: firstly a displacement from the national to the global market of translation;
secondly a focus on publisher’s strategy and list; and thirdly reception.

The field of publishing and the economy of symbolic goods

As a sociologist of culture and of literature, and as the editor of a book series from 1964
on, Bourdieu very early became interested in publishing. In his seminal 1971 article on the
market of symbolic goods (Bourdieu 1971), he developed a theory of the production and
circulation of symbolic goods based on the opposition between small-scale and large-scale
circulation. The field of cultural production is structured around this opposition. The law
of the market rules the pole of large-scale circulation, where sales are the main criterion for

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DOI: 10.1080/14781700802113473
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 Translation Studies 155

measuring success. By contrast, at the pole of small-scale circulation, aesthetic or

intellectual criteria, arising from the judgement of peers (writers, literary critics), prevail
over the larger public’s approbation. Though it denies the relevance of economic profit,
presenting itself as an ‘‘economic world reversed’’ (Bourdieu 1983), the functioning of the
small-scale pole is not entirely devoid of economic rationality: symbolic recognition by
peers is likely in the long run to result in a greater consecration of the text and its author.
When a text is canonized as a classic and included in anthologies, academic programmes
and literary textbooks, it becomes a profitable product for its publisher. This conversion of
symbolic capital into economic capital is a long-term process, as opposed to the search for
short-term profit that is typical of the book industry’s commercial pole. It distinguishes the
economy of cultural industries, the products of which are prototypes (each product being
unique), from that of other industrial production.
The publisher plays a major role in the process of legitimating literary products. In his
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1977 article ‘‘La production de la croyance’’ (‘‘The production of belief’’), Bourdieu

analyzed this role as a transfer of symbolic capital from the publisher to the writer: to
publish is to consecrate. Consequently, the publisher ‘‘creates the creator’’. His or her own
authority is based on the ‘‘credit’’ he or she is awarded by all participants in the recognition
chain, ranging from writers to members of literary juries and literary critics. This chain
demarcates a space that Bourdieu theorized using the concept of field. According to the
amount of symbolic capital (recognition based on the field’s specific criteria) they hold,
agents occupy different positions in this field, where they compete to achieve recognition
and impose their idea of cultural legitimacy. The structure of the field arises from the
unequal distribution of social properties and symbolic capital among the agents. It is
organized around two main oppositions: dominant versus dominated (usually old agents
and newcomers), and autonomy versus heteronomy (small-scale versus large-scale
circulation; see Bourdieu 1984, 1992, 1993; Sapiro 2003).
This theory of symbolic goods gave momentum and new directions to the sociology of
literature in the 1980s and 1990s, while Bourdieu’s insights on publishing found a response
mainly among major historians of the book like Robert Darnton and Roger Chartier. The
1999 survey presented in translation here was the first extended sociological study on
contemporary French publishing, and opened up a new domain for sociological
investigation (see Serry 2005).
A committed sociologist and public intellectual, Bourdieu engaged in a struggle against
neoliberalism during the 1990s, as he was acquiring a worldwide reputation. In the 1999
article he takes a stand against the commercial constraints that are increasingly imposed
on publishers in the wake of growing concentration around large groups and the
rationalization process. These constraints, he contends, threaten the autonomy of the
literary field.
But apart from Bourdieu’s position-taking, this article, based on a statistical survey,
provides important data and a methodological framework for studying the field of
publishing. The main difference from economic surveys is that it takes symbolic capital
into account and tries to build indicators to measure this. First, Bourdieu argues, the
selection process can be observed sociologically through a study of the chain of agents
involved in it, from the series editor to the board and the publisher or manager, including
writers and translators who recommend the manuscript. The editorial board, which
gathers together people belonging to various networks in the media or literary juries,
functions as a ‘‘bank of social and symbolic capital’’ (Bourdieu 2008, 125). But this level of
analysis is not enough. In order to understand the significance of a single publisher’s
selection principles, one has to reconstruct the whole space in which he or she acts and
 156 Gisèle Sapiro

his/her relations with rivals. The perception of this space orients not only the publishers’
practices, but also the way writers frame their enquiry when they address a specific
publisher. Alongside the publisher’s role in the recognition process, this field approach is
Bourdieu’s main contribution to our understanding of the publishing world.
The survey focused on the field of French literary publishers, leaving aside publishers
specializing in other domains. The first methodological question was: what is the relevant
unit? A group composed of different publishers cannot be regarded as a unit. Having a
brand name is a minimal condition but not a sufficient one, because for publishers who
belong to groups the brand name does not necessarily imply the existence of an
autonomous publishing policy. Some other indicators of such autonomy were therefore
included when determining the sample. Very small publishers that do not reach a certain
level of production were also left aside. The sample was composed of 61 publishers of
French or translated literature.
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The second methodological issue is the elaboration of relevant indicators. Five groups
of variables were defined: 1) juridical and financial status of the publishing house; 2)
commercial dependency; 3) weight on the market; 4) symbolic capital; and 5) share of
translated literature in the publisher’s list (percentage of the overall number of titles) and
languages translated. Of these, the fourth group is the most original when compared to
economic surveys, since it tries to establish indicators of symbolic capital on the basis of
the age of the firm, the prestige of its backlist as measured by the Jurt index (the number of
citations of a publisher’s authors in a corpus of 28 dictionaries and textbooks of literary
history published after World War II), and the number of Nobel Prize winners in the list.
The fifth group, which concerns translation, will be discussed below.
These groups of variables were submitted to a multiple correspondence analysis
(MCA), a tool for exploring data and representing it geometrically (Benzécri 1992;
Rouanet and Leroux 1993; Lebaron 2006; for an application to the literary field, see Sapiro
2002a): the higher the number of modalities individuals share, the closer they will appear
on the diagram showing individuals (here the publishing houses; Figure 2, Bourdieu 2008,
132); by the same token, the higher the number of individuals sharing the same modalities,
the closer those modalities will appear on the diagram showing variables or social
properties (Figure 1, ibid., 129). The first, horizontal axis of the MCA ranged the
publishing houses according to their overall amount of both economic and symbolic
capital. It thus opposed the oldest firms, founded before 1945 and endowed with a high
symbolic capital as measured through their backlist, to small publishers emerging after the
war, most of them since the 1970s. While the former are located in the heart of Paris and
mainly ruled by male heirs, the latter are more likely to be found in the provinces and
headed by women with high cultural capital. On the second, vertical, axis, publishers are
mainly differentiated by their independence: big and small independent publishers are
opposed to medium-sized firms which have been integrated in a larger group.
The result of the analysis adds complexity to the common opposition between
independent and non-independent publishers. It is often argued that independent
publishers are innovative whereas belonging to large groups favours the standardization
of literary products. In fact, Bourdieu’s analysis challenges the alleged relation between
innovation and independence, implying instead that independence is not a sufficient
condition to ensure innovation.
Bourdieu is especially interested in the big independent publishers. He argues that even
those endowed with the highest amount of symbolic capital, like Gallimard, rely on their
past by managing their assets
their prestigious backlist
to the detriment of innovation.
They also contribute to standardization by preferring traditional novels to more original
 Translation Studies 157

literary experiments. They praise the storytelling model, imitating the mainstream
American novel, against the formalism of the French modern novel since the nouveau
roman, which is denounced as abstract or self-centred. This argument, Bourdieu claims,
conceals commercial criteria underlying their choices and decisions.
Innovation in the field is mainly supplied by small publishers. Since they cannot afford
to pay high advances on fees to well-known writers, they need to take risks and discover
new authors in order to survive. This contribution to the renewal of literary production
gives new impetus to the dynamics of the field, yet this very dynamism means small
publishers often cannot keep their authors when these achieve recognition. For instance,
publisher Jacqueline Chambon ‘‘discovered’’ Elfriede Jelinek in France long before she was
awarded the Nobel Prize, but before the award came she had already moved to the larger
and older Éditions du Seuil. This is not an isolated case.
What are the implications of Bourdieu’s analysis for translation? Let us turn to the fifth
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group of variables, which covered the percentage of translated literature in the publisher’s
list and the languages translated. These variables appeared to be significant in the MCA.
The first variable opposed, on the first axis, large and small publishers: while translated
literature represents less than 10% of the big companies’ production, the rate often climbs
above 25% in the case of the small publishers’ lists. This indicates that small publishers take
many more financial risks with translation, though the comparison is a little misleading
since big firms publish a larger variety of books, including non-fiction, youth literature and
practical books, alongside literature, while small ones are often more specialized (in
literature in the present case). And of all domains, literature has the highest rate of
translation, reaching between 35% and 43% of new books in France. Thus if we consider
only the literary production of the larger publishers, the rate of translations will probably
be higher than 10% (for instance, translations represented about 25% of the novels
published by Le Seuil in 1999). A more precise survey would therefore be required in order
to compare the actual share of translations in the literary production of these publishers. In
fact, the rate of translations probably also varies as a function of the publisher’s symbolic
capital. An exemplary case is that of the very prestigious Éditions de Minuit, the publisher
of Beckett and of the nouveau roman, which publishes no literary translations at all. This
can be explained by the fact that publishers endowed with high symbolic capital have many
French authors and receive numerous manuscripts in French, so that they are less
motivated to search for new works abroad and invest in translation costs
while, in
contrast, newcomer publishers lacking this kind of literary image are not appealing to
French writers. As Hervé Serry (2002) demonstrated through the case of Éditions du Seuil
after World War II, translation can be a means for accumulating symbolic capital and
building a credible list. For newcomers and small firms, specialization in translation from
particular languages like Chinese can also constitute a ‘‘niche’’ with limited competition.
This brings us to the second variable: the languages translated. Big publishers translate
from English and other Western European languages. They take part in the fierce
competition around bestsellers, with specific means and specialized agents like scouts,
foreign rights managers or literary agents, whereas small publishers seldom translate from
English since they cannot afford the expense. This explains the role they play in discovering
writers in peripheral or semi-peripheral languages, following the ‘‘niche’’ strategy.
Bourdieu’s insightful analysis demonstrates the relevance of publishing to translation
studies. His sudden death prevented him from completing the research programme he
launched with this inquiry, but the task has been taken over by other scholars. It has
developed in three main directions, which I will present in the next section. This model has
also been extended to categories of books other than literature, especially the human and
 158 Gisèle Sapiro

social sciences (see Sapiro and Popa 2007), though this point will not be specifically
discussed here for reasons of space.

From the national to the global book market

Studying books in translation requires us to shift the focus from the national to the
international book market, in which the former is increasingly embedded as globalization
proceeds. This international market has its own structure, one that partly determines the
processes of buying or selling rights, and these transactions must also be analyzed in the
light of the publishers’ strategies and their lists: what are publishers’ criteria for selecting
books to be translated? What is the balance between economic and symbolic criteria? How
are different languages represented in the lists? From a methodological standpoint, this
implies working on databases of books. The change of focus from the national to the
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international market does not mean that the national level is no longer relevant: it is still
decisive if we are to understand the importation and reception processes, as will be shown
in the last sub-section.

The global market of translation

The change of focus from a national to a global scale has been successfully attempted on
various objects, ranging from political economy to literature. Translation is related to both
these domains. On the one hand, unlike music or painting, the international circulation of
literature depends mostly on translation. On the other, translation is not a disembodied
activity but a social practice which depends on intermediaries and, to a large degree, on the
book trade.
Various models for thinking this global space have been elaborated. One of them is the
core
periphery systemic model, which has a powerful explanatory force. It has been
insightfully applied by Immanuel Wallerstein (1974, 1980, 1989) in his world-system
analysis, and Abram de Swaan (1993, 2001) used it to delineate the system of power
relations between linguistic communities as assessed by the number of primary and
secondary speakers. It was on the basis of de Swaan’s model that Johan Heilbron (1999)
described the functioning of the world system of translation, showing that translation
flows move from the core to the periphery. More than half of the books in the world are
translated from English, which thus occupies a hyper-central position (the rate was close to
60% in the 1990s). Translations from French, German and Russian each made up 10
12%
of this market until 1989. These could therefore be considered as central languages
according to Heilbron’s analysis, but the number of translations from Russian drastically
decreased in the 1990s, leaving only two central languages apart from English. Eight
languages have a semi-peripheral position, with a share that varies from 1% to 3% of the
international market (Spanish and Italian, for example). The other languages all have a
share of less than 1% of the international market, and may thus be considered peripheral
(Branchadell and West 2005).
The core
periphery model was applied to literature by Itamar Even-Zohar in his
polysystem theory, which encompassed translation as well (Even-Zohar 1990; Toury 1995).
It shares with field theory a relational approach, though it is more functionalist than
structuralist. The second main difference is that it is more focused on texts than on social
agents (individuals and institutions). Field theory was extended to an international scale by
Pascale Casanova (1999), who used the dominant
dominated opposition and the notion of
 Translation Studies 159

literary capital to describe the power relations between countries in the ‘‘world republic of
letters’’.
I would like here to combine the core
periphery model with field theory and the
economy of symbolic goods, in order to describe the market of translation as embedded in
both the international book market and the international relations between countries. On
this market, different domains (like literature or human and social sciences) enjoy a relative
autonomy and have their specific agents, stakes and rules of functioning. They thus
constitute more or less internationalized fields. At its most autonomous pole, the literary
field has its specific agents
writers, literary translators, literary critics
and its specific
aesthetic criteria. This is also true of the human and social sciences, where scholars play a
central role in the international circulation of works.
Historically, the emergence of an international market of translation was strongly
related to the cultural construction of national identities and to the development of the
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book trade. This market, which was increasingly embedded in the formal cultural
exchanges between countries (Espagne and Werner 1990
1994), began to organize at the
end of the nineteenth century with the Berne international convention on literary property.
Since the 1970s, with the growth of the book market and its concentration around large
groups, some of which are transnational, this market has become more and more global
and unified. It has its specific agents (literary agents, foreign rights managers, translators),
places (international bookfairs), and rules of functioning. The globalization of the book
market thus entailed the professionalization of agents specialized in mediation between
written cultures, a process which provides an analytical framework to understand the
evolution of the social conditions of translators. If the nation states are still major agents in
this market, it has become more autonomous from their control and they now have to
adapt to its rules. Though still having their specific ways of functioning, due to their own
history, the national book markets are increasingly embedded in the international book
market, which mediates between the globalization process and the changes in national
publishing markets.
Combining the models of Wallerstein, de Swaan and Heilbron, we can contrast the core
countries of the Western world with the peripheral countries of the East and South
(bearing in mind that in order to understand the flows of translation, it is the number of
readers rather than the number of speakers which is relevant). A second, closely related
parameter is the development of publishing, which occurred much later in many countries
where the elites were bilingual and there was no standardized national language, as in the
former colonies and the so-called Third World (Pym and Chrupala 2005). The
globalization of the book market has stimulated the development of publishing in many
of these countries over the last two decades.
But economic factors and the size of the book market are not sufficient to explain the
translational power relations between countries (Heilbron and Sapiro 2002, 2007). Political
factors must be taken into account (see Jacquemond 1992; Venuti 1998; Popa 2002; Sapiro
2002b), as must cultural ones (Casanova 2002). According to Casanova (1999), languages
and cultural traditions are endowed with symbolic capital according to the number of
world masterpieces they have provided. This can vary between domains: French literature
or German philosophy are endowed with a high specific capital, explaining why there are
more translations of philosophical works from German than from English into French (see
Sapiro and Popa 2007).
This brings us to the economy of symbolic goods and field theory. The international
book market can be regarded as structured, like the national markets, around the
opposition between large-scale and small-scale circulation. On one side are bestsellers and
 160 Gisèle Sapiro

other commercial genres such as romances, tourist guides and practical books
all
shortsellers that sell tens to hundreds of thousands of copies. On the other are scientific
works and upmarket literary works including novels, short stories, poetry or drama, which
only exceptionally sell ten or twenty thousand copies in the first year after publication.
These distinctions are used in the classifications of literary agents, who oppose commercial
literature to upmarket literary works. Some national book markets are divided into distinct
segments, as in the United States, where the nonprofit publishers (mainly the university
presses, but also independent presses such as The New Press) have a different economic
organization from that of the trade publishers, though some trade publishers do publish
upmarket books. Other markets, like the French one, as we will see below, are much more
unified. Another feature of the French book market as opposed to that of the United
States is the existence of a dense network of independent bookstores. This is one of the
conditions for maintaining a pole of small-scale circulation, since the economic constraints
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are in large part imposed through distribution and the bookstore chains, as Bourdieu
points out in the 1999 study (Bourdieu 2008, 145). The survival of such independent
bookstores is due to French book policy, specifically the law on the fixed book price.
French book policy supports the pole of small-scale circulation in other ways too, notably
by subsidizing translations of literary works and social sciences from and into French.
Bourdieu’s analytical model has many advantages for the study of the international
market of publishing: it allows us to compare the structure of publishing in different
countries and to take into account the specific agents (individuals and institutions) as well
as the international circulation of publishing models. For instance, the French literary
publishing model was imported to the US by Richard Seaver, a leading editor and
publisher, who also introduced writers like Beckett, Ionesco, Genêt and Duras (Sapiro
forthcoming). This has to do with publishers’ strategies, which is the topic of the next
section.
Before we move on, it must be stressed that this model also helps us break with overly
simple oppositions between countries. Though it is certainly right to locate the impulse for
the commercial development of publishing in Britain, the US and perhaps Germany
(Schiffrin 1999), the national book markets, in France as in the US or elsewhere, are all
structured around the same opposition between small-scale and large-scale circulation. In
a quantitative survey of translations of foreign literature into French from 1980 to 2002
(Sapiro 2007b, 2007c), I have shown that the rise in the number of translations was largely
due to commercial literature translated from English and to youth books (again mostly
translated from English). Yet although they have not increased as quickly, translations of
upmarket literature have been stable, and genres like poetry or drama, far from
disappearing, continue to hold a significant share in translations from other central or
semi-peripheral languages (around 8% of the literary translations from German or Italian
and 15% from Spanish are poetry, as opposed to 2% from English).
Furthermore, while the pole of large-scale circulation has its international actors
(scouts, foreign rights managers, literary agents), publishers at the pole of small-scale
circulation do, as I have already suggested, have their own networks in the specific,
relatively autonomous fields: writers, literary critics, translators for the literary field and
academics for the scientific fields. These international networks embody the elective
affinities between publishers in different countries, a factor often emphasized in interviews
I held with American, French and Israeli publishers, expressing a homology of position in
different national publishing fields.
 Translation Studies 161

Publishers’ strategies and the list

Studying publishers’ strategies and their lists is another way of developing Bourdieu’s
sociological approach. This is not a new object of investigation: historians of the book

some of them inspired by Bourdieu’s theory of field
have long been tracing the stories of
individual publishers and analyzing their strategies. But the history of the book in France
has only recently identified translation as a specific object (Sapiro 2007c), and very few
studies of publishers are based on a real quantitative analysis of their lists. Though
Bourdieu planned to study a selection of 500 titles, he abandoned the project, as explained
in note 31 of his article, so that his inquiry is not grounded in the analysis of a database of
books.
The focus on the publisher’s list, in turn, has been a tool for testing some of Bourdieu’s
insights. It obliges us to rethink Bourdieu’s dual economic model at the level of a single
publishing house, since shortsellers often coexist with longsellers in the same list (Simonin
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2004). The investigation thus has to move on to the publisher’s strategy and to the
classification principles of the list
in particular its series, domains or genres.
The role translations can play in the building of a list was suggested by Hervé Serry
(2002), who also confirmed the unequal position of languages in the list using a statistical
analysis of the evolution of the literary translations published by Le Seuil in its foreign
literature series ‘‘Cadre vert’’. Le Seuil, a postwar newcomer in the field, invested in
German and Eastern European literatures at a time when Germany was a defeated country
and Eastern Europe was dominated by the USSR: Günter Grass and Heinrich Böll, for
example, entered Le Seuil’s list at that time, long before they were awarded the Nobel Prize.
By around 1975, Le Seuil had become a big literary publisher and translations from
English began to increase, overtaking those from German. Le Seuil’s initial strategy cannot
be reduced to economics alone, but also arose from cultural and political motives and was
partly based on elective affinities with publishers from other countries. Such cultural and
political motives explain, too, the choices of publishers who translated Eastern European
literature during the communist period (Popa 2004).
Focusing on series is a means to delineate the space of translated literature, especially in
countries like France where ‘‘foreign literature’’ (‘‘littérature étrangère’’) is traditionally
distinguished from literature in French and published in separate series. The space of
translated literature in France is structured around the opposition between large-scale and
small-scale circulation (Sapiro 2007b). On a first level, this opposition broadly distin-
guishes small publishers from big ones, as shown in Bourdieu’s diagram (Bourdieu 2008,
132). But on a second level, I propose that we distinguish different series in the same
publishing house according to this same opposition: a series of foreign literature as
opposed to a series of thrillers or of bestsellers, for instance. A series of foreign literature
like Gallimard’s ‘‘Du monde entier’’ has a very high symbolic capital; to be included is a
real consecration for a foreign author. But it has a small-scale circulation, most of the
books published in it being longsellers. The relative weight of these series in each
publishing house could form the basis for a comparative study of the balance between
symbolic and economic capital, though this would require a very large and thorough
survey of their lists, including literature in French and other categories of books as well.
However, the source-language variable, which is specific to translated literature, is a
good indicator to compare series. As I have demonstrated (Sapiro 2007b), whereas the pole
of large-scale circulation is characterized by linguistic concentration on the hyper-central
English language, there is a high degree of linguistic diversity at the pole of small-scale
circulation. The foreign literature series or domains of the big literary publishers like
 162 Gisèle Sapiro

Gallimard, Le Seuil or Fayard include novels and other literary works translated from
twenty to thirty different languages (and up to forty countries), English representing only
one third. By contrast, 75% of the titles in a Laffont series called ‘‘Best-Sellers’’, mostly the
thrillers and romances, are translated from English. Laffont is an example of a big
publisher with a diversified list, what is called in France ‘‘un éditeur de littérature
générale’’, but it does not carry such an important series of foreign literature as do
Gallimard and Le Seuil, and can therefore be located at the commercial pole of the field of
literary publishing. An example even further towards the commercial pole is Harlequin, a
publisher specialized in romance, most of whose books are translated from English.
At the pole of small-scale circulation, the foreign literature series in big publishing
houses must be distinguished from those of small publishers. The degree of language
diversity is, of course, much lower in the lists of small publishers, their strategy being to
specialize in a few languages other than English. But as Bourdieu suggests, they often

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though not always and not for all languages
act as ‘‘discoverers’’ for unknown authors
who later, when they gain recognition, enter the lists of a bigger literary publisher like
Gallimard or Le Seuil (as illustrated by the example of Jelinek).
If we combine the criteria of the linguistic diversity of translated literature and the
percentage of translations from English, three clusters of foreign literature series can be
distinguished: the small publishers’ series, the big literary publishers’ foreign literature series
(or prestigious literary series including translations like Le Seuil’s ‘‘Fiction & Cie’’; see Serry
2006), and the commercial series. These can only partly be superimposed upon Bourdieu’s
diagrams (notably the distinction between big and small publishers; see Figure 2, Bourdieu
2008, 132), and do not correspond exactly, mainly because of my focus on series and of the
different way I have built my linguistic indicators (isolating English and counting the
number of source languages).
The focus on the publisher’s strategy also opens up a whole domain of research for
studying the norms of translation and connecting social factors to translation practices. In
his insightful chapter on ‘‘The nature and role of norms in translation’’, Gideon Toury
(1995, 53
69) emphasized the social dimensions of the constraints that bear upon
translators. These constraints are not only internalized by translators in their practice,
but sometimes imposed on them by the publisher in the process of revising the manuscript
or typescript. Evidence for this process can be found in archives. This is not specific to
translation, but also concerns non-translated texts. Examples of literature from Switzer-
land, Quebec or other francophone areas, as well as examples of regional dialects or slang,
are typical: publishers at the core tend to normalize peripheral languages, which means
imposing on them the linguistic norms of the core dominant culture (Meizoz 2001; Serry
2007). This norm is probably now changing in France, as exemplified by the case of the
Martiniquan writer Patrick Chamoiseau, who poeticized the creole dialect in his novels
published by Gallimard. Co-edition, whereby a book is published by two different
publishers in two countries in agreement, also provides some emblematic examples of
conflicting translation norms (Buzelin 2007).

Reception
Reflection on norms of translation arose from a change of focus from the source to the
target culture (Holmes, Lambert, and van den Broeck 1978; Even-Zohar 1990; Toury
1995). But while the reception process has been investigated for many years in literary
studies (for France, a pioneering example is Molloy 1972), its rich potential for the
sociology of translation was not fully explored until the last decade. Some recent socio-
 Translation Studies 163

historical research on the reception of foreign works has combined Bourdieu’s theory of
the field of publishing and his reflections on the international circulation of ideas
(Bourdieu 2002). These studies focused either on the reception of a single author through
different periods (for example Kalinowski 1999), on the import and reception of literary
works from a specific language or area and its evolution (Jurt 1999; Popa 2004; Sapiro
2002b; Gouanvic 2007), or on the ‘‘importation’’ of foreign literature more generally at a
given historical moment (Wilfert 2002, 2003; Sapiro 2007a). They share a common interest
in the role and social properties of importers (writers, translators, publishers), and in the
literary and social uses of the translated work according to the specific stakes of the target
field. This allows publishers’ strategies and their choices to be located within a broader
cultural context.
This does not mean that ‘‘export’’ is not relevant: states do have export policies for their
national cultures which must be, and have been, taken into consideration. But as the
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international market of translation becomes free and global, some state representatives
begin to act as literary agents promoting national authors to be translated by publishers in
the target country. There is no space here to discuss the various reasons for these policies
(commercial, political or cultural); and anyway, the motives of the importers will differ.
As Bourdieu (2002) reminded us, citing Marx, texts circulate without their context;
their signification is provided by the context of reception. The publisher, the series,
sometimes the preface, the presentation of the text and of its author, along with the
translation itself
all these elements contribute to assign a meaning to the translated text,
even before the critical reception, which must also be taken into account. Translated works
can be instrumentalized in the internal struggles of specific fields, such as the literary field
or scientific disciplines, in order to renew the space of possibilities. They can also be used
to strengthen the cultural identity of minorities, or to reinforce more or less stereotypical
representations of foreign cultures. In this process texts can be depoliticized, or indeed
highly politicized. Their political meaning might also be radically altered. In some cases, it
is their universal aesthetic or intellectual value that will be emphasized, in others their
documentary or ethnographic character. This is partly, though not entirely, independent of
the texts themselves (on authors’ strategies to make their work translatable, see Apter 2001,
2006). It is these two oppositions
politicized/depoliticized and universal/particular
that
structure the space of reception of translated works (Sapiro 2007b, 129).

Conclusion
The relevance for translation studies of Bourdieu’s approach to the field of publishing is
demonstrated at the macro, mezzo and micro levels. At the macro level, it can be combined
with the core
periphery model to understand not only the flows of translation from one
language to another but also the kind of works translated (genres or categories,
commercial versus upmarket) according to the economic, political and cultural power
relations between countries or linguistic communities. At the mezzo level, publishers’
strategies can be analyzed in the light of the relevant field (national or international
markets like the francophone, anglophone, germanophone) and of their elective affinities
based on the homology between different national or linguistic publishing fields.
Comparing lists and series, along with evidence from archives, offers an empirical basis
for analyzing these strategies. Finally, at the micro level, the process of selecting and
translating one particular book or the work of a single author can be carefully investigated,
while taking into account the constraints imposed on the translator by the publisher and
the specific stakes (economic, political and/or cultural) that determine its importation and
 164 Gisèle Sapiro

reception. Translation and reception, in turn, impact upon the trajectory and strategies of
authors, some of whom increasingly tend to adjust to the global market or to the relevant
international field. This last point highlights the relevance of the sociology of translation
and of publishing to a broader understanding of literary and intellectual history.

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