Multilingual Book Production

Citation

Calvert, P. (2004), "Multilingual Book Production", Online Information Review, Vol. 28 No. 1, pp. 84-84. https://doi.org/10.1108/14684520410522538

This book contains two major arguments. The first is that the Australian book industry may not continue to develop in a traditional path that has concentrated on English language material – a path that has made sense in the past because so many of Australia’s neighbours are hungry for English language books. Instead, book publishers might become agents for greater cultural and linguistic diversity, including the revival of local and ancestral languages and cultures. The second argument is that Australia has the capacity to develop a multilingual book industry, but that there are still some technological, human resource, and enterprise questions that need to be resolved.

For the information manager, the most interesting chapters are most likely the ones on multilingual book publishing in Australia by Ziguras and Brown, which tells us much about changes in the industry even for those not in this part of the world. The chapter on character encoding has too much on eight bit codes and not enough on Unicode, and hence is rather disappointing, and the chapter on typesetting is also of historical interest but of less immediate value. Gerber’s chapter on translation in a digital environment was fascinating to this layman, though probably not of great relevance to most information managers. Takagi’s chapter on typesetting gives the book an international perspective with its examples of Japanese document production. Singh’s chapter on the skills that will be needed for multilingual book production has some relevance to LIS curriculum development, though as his main theme is language preservation – the point that Quebec is a source of numerous bilingual publications makes the point well – shows that it may not be LIS educators that play a significant part.

The C‐2‐C Series has given us some very useful little books touching on book publishing subjects rarely covered elsewhere. This one is perhaps of less interest to information managers than the others, though for anyone directly involved with multilingual book production it must be a rare pleasure to have.