The spread of translations shows no West-to-periphery time gradient.
Evidence
In the first decade after IC’s original publication, one finds two Western European versions (German and Swedish), one Eastern European (Yugoslav), two Latin American (Brazilian and Mexican), two Asian (Japanese and Korean), and one Near Eastern (Turkish). The big surge in European language translations only began in the second half of the 1990s. So far as I can tell, all the translations have been based on the original English, not on previous translations in the languages of regional or colonial hegemons, showing English’s extraordinary global ascendancy. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 819
Categorization
- XREF: Undercuts a diffusionist model of knowledge flow; connects to the broader critical-theory theme that the West is not a self-contained origin-point. Relevant for the scaffolding vocabulary against Orientalism.