Increasingly, it seems that overseas rights and translation contracts are initiated by publishers and their scouts at events such as the Frankfurt and London trade fairs. Are these commercial arrangements similar throughout the world or do they vary from one culture to another? As if confirming Lawrence Venuti's claim for the translator's 'invisibility', there is, to date, no systematic, empirically-informed account of this translation zone in Australian literary scholarship.
This part of Resourceful Reading aims to answer some of these research questions by populating the metaphor of the 'translation zone' with real data.
Professor Dixon has argued for the value of thinking about Australian writing as belonging not just to the nation but also to an expanded field in which national literatures come into being in complex and competitive relations between what Pascale Casanova calls the literary province and world literary space. Central to the cultural economy of this expanded field is the role of the translator, so often rendered invisible, as Venuti has observed.
Australian writers and Australian literature have never been confined to the boundaries of the nation, but are implicated in what Emily Apter calls the translation zone, which she describes as a broad intellectual topography that is neither the property of a single nation, nor an amorphous condition associated with postnationalism, but rather a zone of critical engagement that connects the 'L' and the 'N' of transLation and transNation. Literary influences, intellectual formations, careers in writing, and the processes of editing, publication, translation, reception and reputation-making take place both within and beyond the nation, and in more than one language.
