Through the power of global media, there is more than ever before a market for literature in translation where the default language for such translations will be British or American English. Such versions may sometimes bear as much resemblance to the original as the wrong side of a Turkish carpet, but that hardly seems to lessen their appeal.

Lately in the US the appetite for “foreign fiction” – Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy or Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 – has sponsored a trend that has inspired new audiences for international literary superstars such as Umberto Eco, Roberto Bolaño and Péter Nádas. Perhaps not since the 1980s, when the novels of Milan Kundera, Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa became international bestsellers, has there been such a drive to bring fiction in translation into the literary marketplace. [. . .]

New editions of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Proust’s A la Recherche du Temps Perdu have pushed overworked translators – a shy breed – into the spotlight. David Bellos, whose new book, Is That A Fish In Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything was published this autumn, observes that, in Japan for instance, “translators are rock stars” with their own book of celebrity gossip, The Lives of the Translators 101.

The surge in this global audience for new fiction has been driven by the complex interaction of the IT revolution and the antics of literary promotions such as the Orange Prize and Man Booker hyping their brands through social media.

That last point is an interesting observation, although I’m not sure how accurate it really is. All the authors mentioned above are “name brands” complete with large followings (with maybe the exception of Bellos, although among translation folks, he’s pretty much the bomb). This reminds me of the Radiohead “pay what you will” experiment for In Rainbows. Supposedly, this was very successful in terms of awareness and earnings, but that’s probably due not so much because of the new model, but because it was fricking Radiohead.

Still, it’s interesting to see these books promoted and hyped, and if it paves the way for readers to take a chance on other works of international literature, then good.

McCrum’s article then goes off into discussing the prevalence of English throughout the world, Google Translate, and other interesting language-related observations. Definitely worth checking out . . . And here’s to hoping that next December he’ll be writing a piece entitled: “2012: The Year of Small Presses Named Open Letter.”

When it comes to all things literary, this sort of idea—that English takes over, almost like a virus—creeps me out. But McCrum has a at The Guardian about his book and its core ideas:

What is Globish? For me, it’s not just linguistic, and it all began in 2005. In September that year, Jyllands Posten (the Jutland Post), a culturally influential Danish newspaper, published a sequence of satirical cartoons poking fun at the prophet Muhammad, which provoked riots in which 139 people died. Possibly the most bizarre response to the affair, which surfaced again in January 2010 with an assault on the home of the artist, Kurt Westergaard, was a protest by Muslim fundamentalists outside the Danish embassy in London. Chanting in English, the protesters carried placards with slogans such as “Vikings Beware!”, “Butcher Those Who Mock Islam”, “Freedom of Expression Go to Hell” and (my favourite) “Down with Free Speech”.

This collision of the Koran with Monty Python, or perhaps of the OED with the Islamic Jihad, was the moment at which I began to reflect on the dramatic shift in global self-expression (I didn’t have a word for it then) that was now asserting itself in this crisis, through a world united by the internet. What more surreal – and telling – commentary on the anglicisation of the modern world could there be than a demonstration by devout Muslims, in London, exploiting an old English freedom, and expressing it in the English language, to demand the curbing of the libertarian tradition that actually legitimised their protest?

Then, in 2007, still puzzling over the phenomenon of British and American English as an evolving lingua franca, I came across an article in the International Herald Tribune about French-speaking retired IBM executive Jean-Paul Nerriere, who not only described English and its international deployment as “the worldwide dialect of the third millennium” but also gave it a name.

In a posting in Japan in the 1990s, Nerriere made an important observation. He noticed that, in meetings, non-native English speakers were communicating far more successfully with their Korean and Japanese clients than British or US executives, for whom English was the mother tongue. Standard English was all very well for Anglophone societies, but out there in the wider world, a non-native “decaffeinated English”, declared Nerriere, was becoming the new global phenomenon. In a moment of inspiration, he christened it “Globish”. [. . .]

So here’s the sales pitch. Globish is not about the making of a 1500-word vocabulary, but about the way in which Indians, Chinese and many Africans are now turning to English as a liberating and modernising phenomenon (last year, the government of francophone Rwanda not only applied to join the British Commonwealth but also declared English to be the official language of the country).

At the same time, as well as exploring a decisive new chapter in international communications, Globish begins to identify the viral nature of this lingua franca, the qualities of the English language and its culture that make it so contagious, adaptable, populist and even subversive. It describes a process that echoes contemporary experience: a socio-cultural dynamic that is bottom-up, not top-down. That’s the guiding intuition of Globish, and I’m hoping that my account of it in 2010 will strike a chord with you.

It’s true that in my travels I benefit from the so-called “rise of Globish,” since I can now communicate—in rudimentary terms at times, but still—with people wherever I go. At the same time, I have some old-school fears about how this could influence the way we think: about each other, about language, about art. Very interested to see what McCrum has to say about all this. . . .