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Comment by barry-cotter | Hacker News Reader

> The growing dominance of English has come to mean that European, African, Asian, and Latin American writers are considered to have “failed” if they are unable to reach an international audience.

Is this really true? I can absolutely see it as a possibility for countries that see the US as the centre of the intellectual and political world, like Germany, the U.K. or the Netherlands, but do countries with highly inflated senses of their international importance and power, (France) or a great sense of the beauty or transcendence of their high culture (Italy, Russia) really look to the US so much?

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Reporting in from Germany, not true. The domestic market is fairly big and it is understood that works of non-English origin usually don't do well in English-speaking countries.

Failed in what sense and judged by whom?

Speaking from central-European perspective I find that translations to other languages are generally valued at home, but I have not noticed any supremacy of English and English speaking countries.

I can't see how this is true. There are many works of writing that cannot and should be not be translated to convey the full intention of the body of work. Translations can come close, but rarely can they convey the exact meaning and feel the original work can. To call it a failure because people who don't understand the native language don't read it is a travesty, and I can't see how anyone who takes artistic work seriously could agree that an imperfect copy of a work would tantamount to success.

Don't get me wrong, I love reading works from other cultures written in different languages, but I know that what I am reading may not show the true meaning of what the author intended. Does this make me sad? Yeah a little, I'm still glad I read it, but I know I don't get to see it for its true beauty.

It can’t possibly be true, unless the opinion is coming from the slant that to be successful one must publish internationally —which seems odd. But I guess if you look at it from a Hollywood point of view where for s movie to be successful its international box office take should beat the domestic box office take, I guess that makes sense, but only because that is how they armed defining success themselves. That’s not necessary. In film, you have native Czech and Norwegian and Taiwanese film. They don’t need to become international blockbusters to bd successful.

It is very likely that a majority of cited researches around the world/internet are in English or have been translated to English to allow for easy accessibility to the wider community[1].

[1] https://www.researchtrends.com/issue-31-november-2012/the-la...

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