Mohsen Kafi
Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
Purchasing books was found to be the most popular cultural activity among the adult population of New Zealand in 2002. Also, recent national data (2017) shows that each New Zealander reads an average of 20.6 books a year, which is significantly higher than the average books read in the United States, United Kingdom, and France, among others. Building on this interest, the present study looks at an aspect of reading culture in New Zealand that has received negligible scholarly attention to date. While previous research has mostly dealt with the perceptions of ‘implied readers’ rather than ‘actual readers’, this study employs a self-administered online questionnaire to investigate the attitudes of a purposive sample of adult readers (N=277) in Wellington City towards translated fiction books. The majority of participants are European New Zealanders whose first language is English. The survey findings show that 93% of adult readers in Wellington read more English fiction titles than translated titles, while 84% of the same sample like reading books from their own culture and books from other cultures about the same. The 65+ and 35-44 age groups seem to be the most outward-looking, while the 55-64 age group gravitate towards Anglophone fiction. Several chi-square tests were run to unravel the potential correlations between demographic variables and attitudes towards translated fiction.
The above abstract is a part of the article which was accepted at The Fourth Annual International Conference on Languages, Linguistics, Translation and Literature (WWW.TLLL.IR), 1-2 February 2020, Ahwaz.
