Many artists, such as Japanese popmeister Takashi Murakami, see their work translated to consumer products like handbags, wallpaper and greeting cards.

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And that personal experience then translated into all the great work she's been doing.

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This has translated into less productivity at work, because of anxieties about salary, heavy workload and job security.

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Mr Mabanckou's work has been translated into 16 languages, including Korean and Polish.

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"You can read it as poetry, " said Sun Ganlu, a prominent 54-year-old Chinese writer whose work has been translated into English, French and Japanese.

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An aide told McCain that his publisher had just sold the first foreign rights for the work, soon to be translated into Korean.

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Xu Buzeng, who translated into Chinese David Kranzler's definitive 1976 work, Japanese, Nazis and Jews: The Jewish Refugee Community of Shanghai, 1938-1945, has also lived to see published several of his papers on prominent refugee musicians and composers.

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That's why Heng proposes setting up an Asian playwrights' colony, where writers can gather to hone new work, and where scripts can be read and translated.

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His books were already a success, but it was from a space age home he built near Colombo that the bulk of his work has been done - more than 60 titles of science fact and fiction, translated into more than 20 twenty languages around the world.

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