Value of translations

Recently it was announced (over at Experimental Philosophy) that the main experimental philosophy texts have been translated into French and published in a French publishing house. This made me wonder what value there is in translations.

Personally, I guess that there is much value in it (and I often thought about how to proceed with it, especially in view of the rich and interesting X-Phi literature). However, sooner or later, English will be the lingua franca of philosophy. This means that there will be no more need of having translations in the future. Given that books like the French X-Phi one are mainly aimed at scholars who are and will be used to read and write in English, the need for French or German translations is decreasing.

Yet scholars are not the only ones who are interested in topics such as X-Phi (or at least, they should not be the only ones). There are also non-philosophers and non-academics who are and continue to be interested in what academic philosophy is producing, and these people may not be so used to reading English texts. Therefore it seems that there will always be a market for such translations. In addition, at least currently a lot of students are not exactly used to read English texts and produce good presentations based on their readings. This also seems to point towards the ongoing need for translations.

Now, as I said I regularly think about translating and publishing texts (especially from the X-Phi literature). My questions to you Cocooners, then, would be:

- How does this work, that is, how does one proceed when having such a plan?

- Do you think it makes sense to produce translations (from the point of view of meeting needs, but also from other points of views)?

Comments

[Alex]

Some countries (e.g. France, if I remember correctly) have rules forbidding you from assigning readings in foreign languages at the undergrad level (at least for mandatory readings). And that's why most of the works that get translated into French are either classic books (e.g. van Fraassen's 'The Scientific Image) or classic papers (which then go into anthologies), which are prime teaching material for undergrad classes.