Sunk Costs

I guess it's plight of the translation day here today.

Translation-funding was repeatedly discussed. Krüger noted that in Germany being a translator is a respected profession (and one off which one can live), while in the US publishers seemed to consider translation costs as simply sunk costs, not even caring much about finding the best person for the job. Freihow mentioned that one reason even a tiny country (4.5 million Norwegian speakers !) could sustain university departments in obscurer languages is that students know that they can fall back on literary translation from those languages, which will always be in (at least limited) demand.

The Europeans remained baffled by the lack of translation-subsidies in America (they just can't get over the fact that it's politically unthinkable for public money to be used that way). More troublingly, Krüger believes that, as the conglomerates take over much of publishing, the Europeans, too, are inevitably moving towards a university-press system, where certain types of books can (only) get published on the public dime -- showing little understanding of the American university press system where there is now also a great deal of pressure to balance the balance-sheets. (As we mentioned recently, there even seems to be a strong trend towards books that get published by 'normal' publishers elsewhere (the UK, Canada) only getting published by a university press in the US.)