Wed, February 8, 2012
The Faster Times
The Faster Times is an independent collective of journalists and writers who are looking to create a new model for the newspaper. Please support our work without spending a cent by signing up for email delivery and "liking" us on Facebook.
Email Delivery
Fiction

What Are We Translating From?
Lincoln Michel
December 28, 2009

Three Percent has collected all the data on literary translations in the Untied States for 2009 in a spreadsheet you can download here. Overall the number of fiction translations stayed about the same between 2009 and 2008, but poetry translations dropped 14%. All in all, 348 titles were translated. Using the US government’s “Kid’s Zone Create A Graph” (it was the first thing that came up on Google, I swear), I made a quick pie chart of the most translated languages. The breakdown of most translated languages (Spanish, French, German, etc.) isn’t surprising, but I was surprised that over a quarter of the translations were from languages that only had one to seven titles translated. Some languages with only one title in 2009: Vietnamese, Tamil, Basque and Latin.

graph 1 What Are We Translating From?

share save 171 16 What Are We Translating From?
Share


Lincoln Michel keeps a personal blog at lincolnmichel.com and tweets @TheLincoln. His work appears or is forthcoming in Tin House, Oxford ...

97

MORE FROM Lincoln Michel:

  1. More Barf for the Void: Some Thoughts on Online Lit
  2. Literary Muppets, Amazon’s Issues, Year End Lists, and More Lit Links
  3. Worlds Without Forgetting: TFT Review of Olivier Schrauwen’s The Man Who Grew His Beard
  • http://kenmondschein.com Ken Mondschein

    In my case, sixteenth-century Italian. But I’m a dork.

  • http://www.rochester.edu/threepercent E.J.

    I don’t know why this never occurred to us before, but would you mind if we stole this pie-chart idea for the translation database page?

    E.J.

  • http://lincolnmm.blogspot.com/ Lincoln Michel

    Go for it. Everyone likes charts!

  • Helena Constantine

    I hate to break it to you, but more than one book of translation form the Latin was published in 2009. Not counting reprints I would guess at least 100. Here is a link to 7 books that were translated from Renaissance Latin alone:

    http://www.hup.harvard.edu/itatti/forthcoming.html

    That of course falsifies your claim. I leave it to you as an exercise to hunt around the University Presses and Duckworth, Brill, etc. (who all publish simultaneously in Europe and the US), to find exactly how many books were translated from Latin, and whether my estimate of two orders of magnitude error in your statement was correct, or if it is possibly three. And here is a little tidbit for you. In most years more books are translated from Ancient Greek than from Latin.

  • http://lincolnmm.blogspot.com/ Lincoln Michel

    Hi Helena,

    If you read the post you will notice that I merely made a chart of data collected by the University of Rochester’s Three Percent team (http://www.rochester.edu/College/translation/threepercent/index.php?id=2419) so you might want to direct your comments to them.

    Three Percent is only counting original new translations (not re-translations, paperback versions of hardcovers, etc.) and I assume are also using some kind of of cut-off for what they include, presumably of some commercial availability. You might also note they are only counting fiction and poetry publications, not non-fiction.

    Obviously the total number of translated books would be far more than 348 if you were counting every academic translation, reprint and re-translation!

Get our Newsletter