What has caused the dropoff in translations in the English-speaking literary world? It surely has something to do with the pervasiveness of English around the globe, but Eric Dickens fears that a “selective xenophobia” may have crept into even enlightened minds in the UK and US. “United States power and prestige prop up the English language internationally; and yet English is only the mother tongue of a relatively modest number of people worldwide. Translation obviates the necessity of people having to write badly in English when they can be writing well in their respective mother tongues.”