After MRZine

Today MRZine comes to an end, after over a decade’s run.  Thank you for your past support.

Needless to say, Monthly Review itself will endure hasta siempre, its presence online steadily expanding, including on Facebook and Twitter.

My next project is to establish Movement Translation Service (MTS), inspired by People’s Translation Service and similar efforts before and after it.  There exists a glaring communication gap between English speakers in the imperialist countries and peoples in the rest of the world.  Just to have a glimpse of the gap, consider this: On one hand, “only about 3% of all books published in the United States are works in translation,” and the figure is similar for the United Kingdom — “embarrassingly low” compared to the percentages in other countries, in the words of Literature Across Frontiers (2015).  On the other hand, as an earlier LAF study (2010) pointed out, the collapse of the Eastern Bloc led to “an increasing dominance of English … as a source for literature translations” in Europe, and globally too English is by far the most common source language for them according to UNESCO.  In non-fiction, the exchange is even more asymmetrical.  Communication on the left is no exception to this pattern.

Through MTS, I hope to play a little larger part in filling this communication gap than I could in MRZine, endeavoring to translate into English a variety of voices of the left that would remain untranslated if left only to market forces, publishing oligopolies, and capitalist states.  MTS is currently scheduled to launch in May 2017.

See you soon.

Yoshie Furuhashi
yoshie.furuhashi [at] gmail.com
December 31, 2016