Chapter 7. Conclusion
this book’s studies, giving an interplay between the dominance of English and the
exploitation of this dominance by other-language players. On the one hand, most
poetry translated into English is published and reviewed by English native speak-
ers, who may not necessarily have allegiance to or knowledge of the source coun-
try. Hence at least some publishers and reviewers may perpetuate images and ex-
pectations of the ‘dominated’ source culture within the ‘dominant’ English-language
receptor society (Casanova 2002/2010), both in terms of which poets or works
they publish and review, and in terms of how their titles, reviews, etc. represent
the source culture. On the other hand, a core team of editors, poets, translators,
etc. with a strong allegiance to the source culture or sub-culture can exploit Eng-
l i s h’s status as a global lingua franca to internationalize one or more source
poets, or to communicate their project’s motive to an international audience
(cf. Zauberga 2000).
A production team, however, often contains members with different allegianc-
es: to the source culture (e.g. a source poet), to the receptor culture (e.g. an Eng-
lish-language publisher), and to both (e.g. a translator). Hence a frequent outcome
is a complex interaction between exploitation by the source culture and domi-
nance by the receptor culture. This in turn reflects the other interactions explored
in this book: between poetry translators’ twin skills as source-language readers
and target-language poets, for instance, or between their twin missions as advo-
cates of the source culture and enrichers of the receptor culture.7. 6 Implications
The picture of poetry translating action summarized above inevitably leaves many
questions unanswered, and raises several more. Its theoretical and methodological
framework, however, can support further research into these questions and in
other areas of translation studies, and its findings can be useful in training transla-
tors. Some of these potentials are sketched below.7.6.1 Poetry translation research
This book has built what is, hopefully, a convincing model of poetry translating by
laying a solid foundation in empirical data, and then by analysing it with a range
of research methods which combine the psycholinguistic with the textual and the
social. Two of these methods were little used in previous poetry translation re-
search and hence have been particularly useful: surveying a country’s poetry
translation exports over an extended period, and think-aloud protocols of real-
time translating.