This paper discusses the Flemish Literature Fund (FLF), an autonomous govern ment organisation created in 1999 by the Flemish Community to support Flemish literature at home and abroad. It traces the institutional history of the FLF, situating the organisation in the context of Flanders' longstanding struggle for cultural autonomy within the Belgian state on the one hand and its strong but unequal ties to the Netherlands on the other. Using a translation sociological analytical framework, it goes on to argue that the FLF's outgoing translation grant decisions reflect two strategies of international dissemination: a focus on the central languages of English, German and French, and a strategic use of the picture book genre to break into emerging languages on the periphery, especially Chinese. While the case of the FLF clearly illustrates the shifting power relations between state and market agents in the era of globalisation, it also indicates a novel approach to state-supported literary export designed to maximise a small, stateless nation's international resonance in a world market for translations dominated by larger (nation-) states and languages.
This article analyzes a dataset of over 11,000 book translations from Dutch published in the last two decades to give a global picture of recent outgoing translation flows. It examines four main categoriesgenre, author national grouping (Dutch/Flemish), target language, and translation grant statusrevealing children's literature and fiction to be important export genres; a steady increase in the number of translations of works by Dutch authors and a stagnation in the number of translations of works by Flemish authors; central positions for German, English and French as important target languages, semi-peripheral positions for Spanish, Italian and Danish and an emerging position for Chinese; and a remarkable rise in the number and percentage of translations that received translation grants. The article goes on to explore translation grants in more detail, examining the 'literary quality' criterium and the 'market-correcting' justification used by the Dutch Foundation for Literature and Flanders Literature (formerly known as the Flemish Literature Fund). It concludes by critically evaluating how these two aspects shape outgoing translation flows and potentially reinforce power imbalances within the Dutch-language field.
This chapter focuses on the joint guests of honour at the 2016 Frankfurt
Book Fair, Flanders and the Netherlands – a rare case of two government
organisations representing separate national groupings (Flanders and
the Netherlands) coming together to present the literature of a single
language (Dutch) on the international stage. It recounts how the two
delegations’ shared status as guests of honour for 2016 came about through
a collaboration between the Dutch Foundation for Literature and the
Flemish Literature Fund (now known as Flanders Literature) and analyses
the branding decisions made by the 2016 organizers. Conceptually, the
chapter engages with perspectives from field theory and the sociology
of translation to elaborate branding as a form of position-taking and
guest of honour presentations as important mechanisms of transnational
capital conversion.
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