Abstract

The international circulation of ideas depends on a series of social factors and on the action of intermediaries, as Bourdieu pointed out. The circulation of scholarly books in translation offers a relevant site of observation of intellectual exchanges across cultures. What academic books are translated and why? This paper proposes a general framework of factors determining the translation of scholarly books and of the circulation channels. Six sets of factors are analyzed: power relations between languages and cultures, symbolic capital and other properties of the author, properties of the book, symbolic capital of the publisher, editorial and academic networks, private and public funding. Some of them are specific to this category of books, others are characteristic of upmarket translations, others derive more generally from the power relations structuring the global book market. This framework is grounded in an empirical study of the cross-circulation of scholarly books between French and English in the era of globalization, mixing quantitative and qualitative methods. In this period, the United States became hegemonic in many domains, including the book market, a process which started in the 1970s, while the French hegemony declined, without however losing its symbolic capital in the area of the social sciences and humanities.