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Brave new world: Naveen Kishore at Seagull Books. | Photo Credit:
Gurmehar Kaur
In a scenario where U.K. or U.S. publishers almost exclusively decide which translated books the Third World gets to read, Kolkata-based Seagull Books bucks the trend by commissioning translations directly for both local and global markets
The politics of translation has been brilliantly excavated in recent decades by theorists ranging from Walter Benjamin to Gayatri Spivak. More quantitative studies also exist, indicating how translation flows in certain directions: for instance, from English to other languages, sometimes even from one language to another via the medium of English. These are highly unequal flows in a world of great inequalities. A handful of languages, with English as the first of the first, determines these flows.