Free Essay On Cultural Differences in the Era of Globalization

Cultural Differences

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Summary

The current article mainly ascertains contribution of globalization to cultural diversity through translation. The article reveals that due to large number of translation, the dominance of English language has increased.
According to recent experience and trend, globalization supports exchange and dialogue between different cultures. The core purpose of globalization has been to open national borders to motivate and improve goods and capital’s circulation (Gisèle, 2014).
According to Heilbron (1999, as quoted in the article), this model affected the book market through translation by means of book circulation. The translation paves the way for international relations among linguistic groups and nation-states. The article describes three types of power relations: cultural, political and economic and their association with translations. It claims that circulation of print is related to economic dimension. For instance, the export of commodities or other goods has a strong relation with translation. Similarly, cultural and political elements are important to create a space for circulation for written text one such example is nations cultural hegemony (as cited, Heilbron and Sapiro, 2002, 2007; Sapiro ed., 2008) (Gisèle, 2014).
The globalization created international book market. The oldest industry in the culture industries is the printing industry. However, this industry was limited to a few cities such as Paris, Leipzig and London. Therefore, they acquired political power and became centre of culture. Rationally, the construction of national identities is due to printing industry. Moreover, during similar period, the capitalist countries desired to enter into new markets of countries with imperialist culture policies. This motivated the work of translation of books in different languages such as French, German, English and Spanish (Gisèle, 2014).
The hegemony of different culture centers, such as British and French, of the world was challenged by the increase of national identities. For instance, Belgian publishers did not like the French films’ domination in the francophone area and they unsuccessfully tried to counter it. However, by developing a book industry the United States succeeded in overpowering the British (Gisèle, 2014).
Construction of national identities became the reason to start translation that became the main source for books’ transnational circulation. Hence, the nationalization of culture was closely attached to the internationalization process. As it has been mentioned earlier that the culture centers of the world were England and France, therefore, English and French have been the most translated languages (Gisèle, 2014).
Nonetheless, after the Second World War, on the circulation of the cultural products, the economic limitation became inflexible. Within the framework of international negotiations, the emergence of global market for records, movies and very slowly for books was observed by the trade market. Now the translation culture favored Latin American and Asian languages for translating European languages. Similarly, Russian literature was focused, after the formation of the Communist bloc. Gradually, this transformed into service trade, goods and cultural products’ trade (Gisèle, 2014).
The role of UNESCO is undeniable for the promotion of cultural diversity. In this regard, it took two steps ‘Declaration of cultural diversity’ of 2001 and Convention on the protection of ‘cultural diversity’ of 2005 (Gisèle, 2014).
According to the article, international book fairs increase during 1980s and this is the proof that globalization played an important role for the unification of global market.
The British publishers had more resources due to old British Commonwealth. On the contrary, the United States had to fight very hard to develop a cultural diversity through publishing (Gisèle, 2014).
Clearly, the focus of the article has been on globalization, translation, book industry and their relation with cultural diversity, sale of cultural products. It also evaluates the impact of translation, globalization and book industry by providing authentic examples from the history of different countries. Moreover, it discusses that how countries have been battling acquiring political, cultural and economical power through translation and book publication (Gisèle, 2014).
Translation played various roles for political, cultural and economic impact. Translation has many agents such as translators, critics, booksellers, publishers and literary agents. They all belong to different cultures and speak different languages but they work together and create a cultural diversity (Gisèle, 2014).

References

Gisèle Sapiro. (2014).Translation as a Weapon in the Struggle Against Cultural Hegemony in the Era of Globalization. Retrieved from http://www.alliance-editeurs.org/IMG/pdf/bibliodiversity_3_sapiro.pdf