Traduciendo la diversidad: agentes institucionales y políticas de traducción literaria en Iberoamérica (2001-2022)

Translation programmes and subsidies for translation have significantly grown in the last years. They contribute to creating literary value and symbolic capital, and are an excellent tool for the dissemination and projection of national authors in the international literary market. This project analyzes to what extent literary and cultural diversity are fostered through the translation programs of a representative set of national institutes for culture from Ibero-America (Spain and Latin America) in the first two decades of the 21st century. The project takes the UNESCO Declaration on Cultural Diversity (2001) as a point of departure, and 2022 as the closing date when Spain was invited as the country guest of honor in the Frankfurt Book Fair. The project will study how translation policies operate and what sort of cultural and literary diversity is being promoted. In this respect, Trad-Divers focuses on the analysis of Ibero-American public agencies and national institutes for culture sponsoring translations in the framework of broader projects of cultural diplomacy and foreign cultural action. Our goal is to examine the mechanisms through which national and regional governments exert agency in the literary field, reconstruct their translation policies at different scales (local, national, regional, global), and reassert the role of public actors in the global literary space. The project proposes three general goals: 1) To establish a theoretical framework applying the notion of soft power to translation studies and, more specifically, to translation history and translation policies; 2) to propose a transregional comparative analysis of translation policies in Ibero-America providing empirical evidence with new and reliable data, and 3) to offer innovative research for decision and policy makers. The project assumes the hypothesis that the translation policies promoted by national institutes for culture have a twofold purpose: on the one hand, translation policies are a tool for nation-branding and soft power as they help exporting literary texts originally related to one specific language and literature. On the other hand, translation policies are often aligned with the market trends, by reinforcing its tendencies given that the Ibero-American publishing industry tends to be considered as economically vulnerable and needs to be helped and protected. In this respect, the granting of translations might be considered fundamental for relevant social debates such as gender equality and the promotion of women writers. This projects takes an interdisciplinary approach and establish a dialogue between fields that interact and meet such as translation, literary and gender studies, international cultural relations and political science, and digital humanities. Methodologically, this project combines quantitative and qualitative approaches (interviews and close reading) and will comparatively examine, for the first time, the publication of extranslation in Ibero-America through public funding. In the analysis, the project will proceed in a five-stage process by exploring translation flows, translated authors, and translated genres from a wide range of datasets that will be crisscrossed and compared. In conclusion, this project will pool resources to identify sustainable and unsustainable cultural practices, and devise better translation policies, with the objective of improving the dominant cultural models.