The Three Percent Problem. Chad W. Post
It would be a much better situation if translation into English was more valued.
English’s indifference to translation is not merely a problem for native speakers of English who thus deprive themselves of contact with the non-English-speaking world. It is also a roadblock to global discourse that affects writers in every language, and serves as one more means by which English consolidates its power by imposing itself as the sole mode of globalization. [. . .] The real issue is not the English language itself, or its global scope, but the cultural forces within the language that are resistant to translation.
There’s no need to explain here the “cultural forces” that are resistant to translation—I think anyone reading this is pretty aware of the latent prejudices among reviewers, buyers for the chains, publishers, etc., that translations don’t sell. It’s more complicated than that, and one point Esther does make that is worth identifying is the status of translations in the academy. Typically translations are greatly undervalued in the academy (University of Rochester and a few other places being exceptions to the rule) and most scholars avoid mentioning the dreaded “t” word:
Faculty members who continue to publish translations sometimes do so under pseudonyms, for fear of seeing their scholarly reputations tainted, or simply leave the translations off their curricula vitae when career achievements are being evaluated.
What’s especially disturbing about this is that translators definitely aren’t valued by the marketplace, and if they aren’t protected in universities, they’re pretty much screwed. (Unless governments or private funders heavily subsidize literature in translation, but that’s another can of worms entirely.)
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One of the things worth pointing out in Esther Allen’s essay is how shoddy all the data is for literature in translation published in English. In contrast to other countries, we come off as an ass-backward second-rate country. Case in point: in 2000, when switching databases, Bowker—the central place where publishing statistics are recorded—quit tracking the number of titles published in translation. Nice. Every year Bowker is able to report on the number of sports books published, but not translations.
So all of the numbers cited are a bit shady. Nevertheless, as you can see below, a number of organizations have attempted to come up with a figure (often around 3%, which, ahem, is the basis for the name of this blog), although most of these studies provide summary data without many details. All of these studies led to our creation of the 2008 Translation Database, which hopefully will support the findings below while also providing detailed information about each work in translation so that the complete list can be added to, analyzed, and manipulated in various ways.
Anyway, here are the studies and stats Esther summarizes in this essay:
• Bowker: According to information Bowker released in October of 2005, in 2004 there were 375,000 new books published in English. (Including titles published in the UK, Australia, Canada, etc.) Of that total, approx. 14,440 were new translations, which is slightly more than 3% of all books published. The U.S. accounted for 4,982 of those titles, but this figured includes nonfiction as well as literature. Breaking it down to just adult literature and fiction titles, only 874 works in translation were published here in the States in 2004. And this number is very misleading, since it includes retranslations, reprints, etc. (Again with the summary stats without the details.)
• NEA: The NEA looked at the 12,828 works of fiction and poetry published in the U.S. in 1999 and found that only 297 were in translation. And this number also included retranslations. (On a positive note, even extracting reprints, new translations of classic works, etc., it seems that there was a genuine increase between 1999 and 2004, which is encouraging.)
• Center for Book Culture: I helped with this study, which looked at the number of literary works published by country for the period of 2000-2006. In this report—still lacking in rich detail, since the list of published titles making up the figures was never published and is therefore somewhat suspect—France fared the best, having had 52 books translated into English during this time (ave. of 8.7/year), with Italy’s 39 (6.5/yr) and Germany’s 36 (6.0/yr) coming in second and third. What’s really depressing is the slew of countries below 1 book/year, such as Argentina, Belgium, Denmark, Hungary, Lithuania, Romania, Catalonia, etc. (Mysteries and anything “genre” related was excluded from these numbers, which is another reason it would be nice to have the list of books. By comparison, through Apr/May, there are 14 German books in our translation database.)
• German Book Office: Over the past few years, the GBO has been keeping track of the number of translations reviewed in Publishers Weekly compared to the total number of books reviewed. In 2004, 132 translations were reviewed out of 5,588 total translations. In 2005, this number had shot up to 197 reviews out of 5,727—another encouraging sign.
Another good source for info on translations is Annotated Books Received, a journal published by the American Literary Translators Association that contains information on any translation submitted to the journal. Exactly the opposite of the studies above, this journal provides tons of specific data, but no summary info breaking out books available in Canada from U.S. ones, or retranslations from originals, etc. Still it’s an excellent publication, although the most recent issue online is from 2006 . . .
Overall, all these studies are useful, since they help us get a handle on how many works in translation are being published. And in various ways, they all point toward the same figures, which, logically, is what we should expect since they’re drawing from the same subset of the overall population. Still, I think this points to the need for better tracking (why isn’t “translation” a category at the Library of Congress?) in order to analyze trends, and have a better sense of what’s being published from where and by whom.
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I want to write a bit about the second essay in the book—Simona Skrabec’s “Literary Translation: The International Panorama.”
Complementing Esther Allen’s introductory essay, this piece looks at literary translation internationally, whereas Esther’s article was primarily focused on the U.S. In creating this report, twelve different PEN centers from around the world responded to a questionnaire about the translation situation in their country. Based on their responses (which are detailed more fully in part 3 of the report), Skrabec wrote a sort of summary.
There are a few interesting threads in this article, in particular the status and treatment of translators, English as a “useful intermediary,” and the subsidy situation. All of which relate, in one way or another, to the economics of publishing literary translations.
Picking up on an idea from Esther Allen’s section, the idea of English as a “useful intermediary” is really interesting.
Lithuania’s PEN Center highlighted an occurrence that while common, is seldom so clearly illustrated as in this country’s case. Most of the nation’s literary translations into English are made in Lithuania. All the questionnaire respondents stated that they considered translations of works into English as key to their country’s projection abroad but that access to the English-language book market appeared practically impossible. The expression “useful intermediary” used by Lithuania’s Laimantas Jonusys thus seems particularly appropriate. Books are translated into English despite their slender chances of ever reaching English-speaking readers. Rather, the aim is to get the attention of intermediaries who might foster their translation into languages (such as French and German) that are much more open to foreign writers.
That’s really a sad situation, although sort of cool to imagine a samizdat library of unpublished works translated into English floating around . . . (Actually, as I mentioned earlier, this is how we came to Bragi Olafsson’s The Pets. The Icelandic publisher paid to have it translated into English so that they could present it to more publishers.)
One of the difficulties in regard to using English as an intermediary language is the lack of translators capable of translating from “smaller languages” into English. Obviously, there are a slew of great Italian, German, French, and Spanish translators, but for languages like Lithuanian, Latvian, Estonian, Croatian, Macedonian, etc., there are only a handful of excellent literary translators.