The share of the economy related to translation activities is growing steadily under the influence of the globalization of exchanges. Today it numbers dozens of billions of which an increasing share belongs to machine translation. Various factors, such as migratory flows or the propagation of mobile telephony, prompt new translation practices in a variety of languages with simultaneous coverage enabled by networks. Nevertheless, is it true as we intuitively believe that translation promotes linguistic and cultural diversity? This article originates from a study conducted for UNESCO’s world report on cultural diversity (2009). This study notably reveals that 75% of all books are translated from three languages with 55% being from English. On a planetary scale, translation is dominated by some twenty languages, primarily European. In the new world economic order, the urgent and paradoxical task is to “rebabelize” the world.

中文翻译：

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全球化，翻译和文化多样性

在交流全球化的影响下，与翻译活动有关的经济份额稳步增长。今天，它的数量达到了数百亿，其中越来越多的份额属于机器翻译。诸如迁移流或移动电话的传播之类的各种因素促使人们以多种语言进行新的翻译实践，同时网络实现了同时覆盖。然而，正如我们凭直觉认为翻译可以促进语言和文化多样性一样，这是真的吗？本文源自为联合国教科文组织关于文化多样性的世界报告（2009年）进行的一项研究。这项研究尤其表明，所有书籍中有75％是从三种语言翻译而来的，其中55％是英语。在全球范围内，翻译主要由约二十种语言（主要是欧洲语言）主导。