CULTURAS IN VITRO
Cultural Globalization Is Not Americanization: Globalization not only increases individual freedom, but also revitalizes cultures and cultural artifacts through foreign influences, technologies, and markets. Thriving cultures are not set in stone. They are forever changing from within and without.
Lost in translation: the narrowing of the American mind: The indifference of American public culture to the imaginative experience of other peoples is reflected in the dearth of work translated from foreign languages. As the world becomes more complex and its literary voices more varied and challenging, the damage of this complacency is not only to unheard, unread writers, but to the American mind itself. [...]
About 3% of the fiction and poetry published in the United States in 1999 was translated (approximately 330 out of the total 11,570 fiction and poetry titles published).
Reading Europe: The long anti-European years of the Thatcher-Major era plunged us into a meretricious world in which speaking or reading English was all you needed. Our schools - even our universities - all but gave up the fight to enforce a second language as a norm.