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Authors | Michael Cronin

Michael Cronin holds a Personal Chair in the School of Applied Language and Intercultural Studies, Dublin City University. He is the author of Translation and Globalization (2003), Translation and Identity (2006), Translation goes to the Movies (2009), The Expanding world: Towards a Politics of Microspection (2012) and Translation in the Digital Age (2013). His Eco-Translation: Translation and Ecology in the Age of the Anthropocene will be published in 2016 by Routledge.

Articles on Amodern by Michael Cronin

READING THE SIGNS

Translation, Multilingualism, and the New Regimes of Attention

Attention is now the most valuable economic commodity in the digital age. Capturing people’s attention in a crowded media space has become more and more problematic. In a multilingual world an economics of attention is confronted with the necessity of translation in order to gain people’s attention in different languages which is precisely the rationale of the worldwide localization industry. But is a notion of attention without value sustainable? In this article we will argue that attention is inextricably bound up with value and that formulating a new ecology of attention in a multilingual world means looking again the ethical orientation of translation in a globalized world.