Print publishing is currently – once again – experiencing interesting times, with a familiar series of debates being played out internationally in the press and in public discourse over the impacts of various forms of e-publishing on the free circulation of knowledge, the future and form of libraries, the financial sustainability of print publishing (particularly literary print publishing) and – depending on one's position on all of the above – increased new commercial choices proffered to the consumer, or hard times for traditional publishers as their trusted position in the market changes. Such passionately engaged debates notwithstanding, the patterns of global distribution of knowledge are still largely prescribed by a fairly rigid set of structures and traditions of publishing that can be traced back over at least four centuries, alongside an equally and concurrently established understanding of intellectual property and copyright as legally defined moral rights. Translation also has a well-established place within this system, though, as Lawrence Venuti (1998) has argued, the positioning of translation in the publishing system and more widely tends to minimize the economic and cultural value accorded to both the translator and the translated text. Venuti's argument is sound, but we shall argue that translators and translations may still hold great power: if publishers, whether they produce and sell printed or digital text (or, as is increasingly the case, both), still retain a substantial degree of their power in their political, social, cultural and intellectual roles as, in Lewis Coser's phrase, ‘gatekeepers of ideas’ (cited in Altbach, 1978: 304), translators and the translated text may also participate in this gatekeeping function.

This chapter seeks to bring into focus some of the ways in which the established international structures and traditions of publishing and the trade in print and translation continue to influence knowledge in certain crucial ways which have specific resonances for the postcolonial field, while never being unique to that field. The model of contemporary book publishing is a Western one that was exported alongside Western imperialism. In this, at the very least, it is true to say that certain structures and assumptions underpinning Western systems of production of knowledge were carried along in the West's expansionist and capitalist projects of imperialism, and on the way along its path certainly disrupted other and competing structures of production, trade and consumption of knowledge, while also disrupting competing ideas of what constituted legitimate and worthwhile knowledge.