Unheard (european) voices?

It’s undoubted: the academic community ought to speak a common language to share contents in real time; and, nowadays, this esperanto can be the “global english” only. It’s pacific: to share their researches and contents throughout the world: professors, advocates, researchers and students love to use english to make their messages and projects public and easy to share. And this is valid and true in particular for the cross-mediality as object and discipline. But… what if also the publishing houses would use the same parameter, that is to publish just books written in english?

More than the 70% of the essays and handbooks focusing on Media Studies published in Italy, for example, are books originally written in another language: english, french, deutch, spanish, polish, portuguese… Even the smallest corporate in our market translate and publish foreign texts regularly to help people learning  better and knowing more about communications, media techniques and imaginery. But… as you know them, how many US publishing house, for example, have an in-house reader that can judge french, italian, spanish etc… titles? So, how to compensate this absence? Are you sure that literary agents are the best solution actually?

Just a personal example: since Cross-media communication is such a young discipline, I wrote the first book focusing on cross-media in the world here in Italy in 2005. Then, I published the second one (one of the 5 published all over Europe today) in 2009, and it got published by one of the most important corporates in Italy (mutatis mutandis, the same that published the optimum Henry Jenkin’s “Convergence Culture”…). Dozens of students and young researchers studied them and today I’m so proud they are at owrk for majors and european broadcasters. But… did any US publishing house notice it?

Yes, many and complicated are the reasons of the fact: the small dimensions of the italian market, the “big risk” of the scouting activity, the absence of translators from italian to english in US for example, the low quality of many texts (like my books, probably!) etc.! So, I’ll write my next essay using my global (and incorrect) English and my students will study it in that language, ok! But… are you sure that this would be the real, ultimate and best solution for the audience too? And not just for Italians, or Europeans… [Max Giovagnoli]