Hacker News Reader

Isn’t it kind of implicit in the English language description? Like if there was a site/post “les cent meilleurs livres de 2023”, it would be fairly unsurprising if they were all in French.

I would love a more inclusive, multilingual culture, but I’m not sure qualifying sentences to refer to the language they’re written in is the right place to start?

There would never be a site/post "les cent meilleurs livres de 2023" on a global discussion board such as this because by definition it would not be in English. There might be a "the best french books of 2023" post, although there wouldn't be, because French books simply don't exist in the anglosphere, but my point is precisely that the global conversation happens in English, the only word that ever reaches it is "book", and it's never about anything else than English books.

You're just wrong. You're defining "global" discussion boards to only include that which is in english. There are vast francophone sections of the internet, not to mention chinese, malay, hindi, spanish etc. You are fully welcome to go and look at these places as well; they are also global in the same sense that y combinator is.

hacker news is a discussion board attached to a startup accelerator based in silicon valley. it's only global because many people find the content that's *already here* valuable.

> You are fully welcome to go and look at these places as well; they are also global in the same sense that y combinator is.

Allow me to respectfully disagree: they are not. The dominance of US culture around the world, for the best and for the worst, is a fact of life for all of us who live outside it. If you look at the rates of translation of books from and to English, you will immediately see where the center and the periphery lie.

That seems to be an isolated standpoint. While the US and UK undeniably have a big influence on global thinking, they are surely far from dominant in any than some specialised categories?

Going through some the biggest countries by population: China, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Brazil, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Russia, Mexico, Japan, Iran, UK, Germany, France, which one would you say would have a big to moderate US cultural influence? I would say UK, Mexico, and to a lesser degree Germany, and then France, everything else hardly?

Book publishing looks also healthy in a lot of countries https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Books_published_per_country_...

Random people from all these countries can name of the top of their head a bunch of any of the following:

- US presidents

- US pop artists

- US filmmakers

- US cities

- US CEOs

- US companies

- US TV shows

I stopped there but I could go on for long. Now, take any country X other than the US and ask a random resident of any of the other countries to name just one of each category: a president of X, a CEO, a film, etc... If you think the answer has any chance to compete with the equivalent question asked of the US, well, I think you don't realize how big the cultural influence of the US is. What is domestic news in the US is still news in the rest of the world, but the reverse is simply not true.

We apparently live in very different societies.

Of course a random Indonesian would know Indian, Chinese, and French presidents, and vice versa. Young people I see hype up Korean bands. Chinese, Japanese, German, French and Indian companies are well known and highly influential (Ant, Tata, Huawei, all car brands, Samsung, Sony, Nintendo, …). Who are US filmmakers that are more known than non-US ones, Spielberg and Nolan?

Your experience is obviously vastly different. Let’s just not state it as fundamental truth.

> books accessible in the US

Sadly books accessible in the US / English language is slowly becoming synonymous with general availability, through no fault of the US/UK or other English speaking countries. A huge amount of books are simply never translated to language with smaller markets. I can read English just fine, but an entire book is a struggle. There are so many books that I want to read, mostly non-fiction, and they are never going to be translated and even when they are circulation is low and reprints are rare. Normally I can read a book in Danish in about a week, depending on the time available, and English book is normally about three to four weeks.

To be clear: I solely blame Danish publishers and bookshops. They churn out crime/detective novel at an absolutely insane pace. Want to read about someone being killed and have the murder investigate by an alcoholic Scandinavian cop, the Danish publishers have you covered. Want to read "Meditations" in Danish, well screw you. Want to read the most popular book on this list, Demon Copperhead, well to bad. Slaughterhouse-Five you can get, for more than three times the price of the English version.

I get this is probably different for Chinese, German, French or Spanish, but for smaller language you either read what everyone else reads or you read English language books.

Well, I don't think anyone in particular is to blame; I'm guessing Danish publishers and booksellers cater to their public and have little economic leeway to risk translating risky books for a small linguistic group. That's the problem, it's the effect of the forces at play in a global free market economy dominated by the English language: we all have to roll over and make way for what sells, regardless of the respect literatures and languages otherwise deserve.

I'd agree with that, it's just that the bookstores complain about rapidly declining business, and honestly most bookstores aren't bookstores anymore, they are arts and crafts stores with a few books. It's just that if they want to sell a larger number of books, then they need to have a larger selection, which would require them to invest in translations.

It's true that translations are costly, so instead they opt to push books they know will sell well, but the supermarkets sell those exact same books. It's just that without a large selection there's no reason to specifically go to a bookstore and so they die out.

Agreed.

A side note I want to add to this: copyright and other IP laws make sure a lot more money goes from Denmark to the US than from the US to Denmark. I think smaller cultural domains are loosing in a sense. European movie makers constantly need grants where Hollywood booms.

> Sadly books accessible in the US / English language is slowly becoming synonymous with general availability, through no fault of the US/UK or other English speaking countries. A huge amount of books are simply never translated to language with smaller markets.

Depends on the market I guess. I've checked the availability of the top 10 books of 2023 on Shepherd (https://shepherd.com/bboy/2023) in Hungary, which is a tiny market of ~10 million people. 50% of the books are available in in translated version, which I think is not terrible.

I appreciate the discussion but this does read a bit ridiculous to me. If we are speaking English and we say the best books of 2023 I cannot imagine any scenario that we would think the books are not written in English. I would immediately assume this includes translated books but again in English. Similar if it was the best book list in German or any other language I would assume all of the books are written in that language.

I don’t understand what there is to hate. If I was visiting a site written entirely in French I would have zero expectation that any book list would clarify that the books are French language. What game is being played?

Thanks for your answer. I will try to clarify a bit.

Of course we all know the books are going to be written in English. I am not trying to ask for an idiot-proof label stating the obvious lest a reader might waste a click expecting German-language books.

The point I am trying to make is that the word "book" in the dominant anglosphere has come to mean almost exclusively books coming from an English-speaking country (and even among those I'm sure the proportions are skewed towards the US/UK, although I would be happy to be disproved). So if I discuss "books" in an English conversation (English being the language we are all forced to speak globally now) it is often implicitly expected that we are discussing those books, the books of the anglosphere. Some food for thought, less than 1% of books read in the US are translations[0], which is not the case in other countries (if only because a lot of countries read a lot of translated books from.. English).

> If I was visiting a site written entirely in French I would have zero expectation that any book list would clarify that the books are French language

This comment seems to assume that all languages are equal and interchangeable; they are not. This is maybe hard to realize from within the English-speaking global culture, but other languages are now vassals of English. What I'm saying is that it would be a small act of acknowledgement of this hegemony to remember what is being left out of the conversation.

[0] https://lithub.com/why-do-americans-read-so-few-books-in-tra...

Creator here: Translations are on my radar, and I will look at how I can identify translations as well to break them out into their own subsection of this list in future years (I think there is value in that). I don't know how to do that yet :).

To the larger point, I understand what you are saying. The world is moving toward one global language, and that has pros and cons. My hope is it has more pros than cons, but we could also be losing or minimizing some very special aspects of culture/thinking that language impacts. I think about this a lot as I live in Portugal, and I am likely moving to France in 2024.

I was just reading this NY Times about this type of thing happening within French today: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/12/world/africa/africa-frenc...

Thanks for the link! And I really appreciate any work about books, really, and yours is of great magnitude, thanks for sharing your project. If you ever look to expand it to French, I could be interested in helping.

Sweet, how can I get in touch? my email is ben@shepherd.com if you want to drop me a hello :)

I think you might have some sympathy with the arguments made in the book-length essay 日本語が亡びるとき: 英語の世紀の中で, which also argues that the English language dominance has a deleterious effect on non-English-language literature and that English speakers don't really notice this. (The book is available in English translation under the title "The Fall of Language in the Age of English". I don't think it's available in French translation, which is another example of English-language-dominance: English books get translated into lots of other languages, non-English books often get an English translation only, if that.)

I've read it, and I warmly recommend it! And it is true and ironic that the only language I could read it in was.. English

It’s funny, because your response highlights the problem:

For a native speaker, it’s obvious. For the rest of the world that speaks English as a second language, there is no such implication; most content we consume and platforms we visit online is in English, and the language also serves as a common denominator between speakers of several foreign languages, where the only shared one is English. Hence, we absolutely use English platforms to discuss non-English content.

Creator here: I would love to expand and support books in other languages. But the technology challenges and costs associated with that are massive. It is on my radar but not something I can examine until I meet my costs on this project. I have talked to friends in Spain and France about this (I live in Portugal).