Eeny, Meeny, Miny, Moe: The Reception of Retranslations and how readers choose.

Abstract

One of the paradoxes of the digital age is that it has fostered small, independent enterprises alongside corporate multinationals, a trend reflected in publishing where international players co-exist on the web alongside small, independent publishers often keen to commission retranslations as ‘safe bets’. Due to customers’ ease of access over the Internet and sellers’ low costs, book sales increasingly correspond to the ‘long tail’ statistical model whereby high numbers of relatively few bestsellers are sold, with the graph ‘tailing off’ sharply to a high number of items selling few copies. Many retranslations are often available simultaneously and, as sales are spread among them, will tend to be distributed along this tail. As online book sales increase, whether as hard copies or in digital format, when it comes to buying a translated text, customers often find themselves confronted with a choice between several different editions. This paper investigates some of the influences affecting choice, using Italian retranslations of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and English retranslations of Machiavelli’s The Prince as examples. Reference will be made to the shift from professional review writing to online customer appraisals and star-ratings, the presence of retranslations on bestseller lists as well as to the importance of paratextual elements such as book covers.