Abstract:

This paper uses the Kazakh translation of Harry Potter as a lens to explore broader transformations in language politics and economy in Kazakhstan. Starting off with disagreements about phonetic representations, I then zoom out into what this tells us about the Kazakhstani publishing industry and the idealized relation between book “quality” (in terms of translation and materiality) and social change, primarily experienced as generational difference. I focus on publishing houses that have proliferated in Kazakhstan in the last five years, which primarily translate world literature directly into Kazakh from the source language, bypassing Russian mediation. These 'new publishers,' with employees all in their 40s or younger, self-consciously contrast themselves with the legacy presses largely founded in the nineties in the decade after independence.

I argue that “quality” is a primary idiom through which the comparison is made between the legacy publishers and these new publishers. The legacy system produces books that many have said are not worth reading, incomprehensible, and of nondescript design. In contrast, the new presses’ lack of state involvement and funding is thought to enable them to produce books and texts of a higher quality. However, though committed to market-based models, the new publishers describe themselves as “socially oriented” with an eye towards the public good. This paper traces the contours of their de-Russification developmentalist model as they attempt cultivate new Kazakh-speaking subjects through print circulation.