The Three Percent Problem. Chad W. Post
• French Voices is a new program that was started by Fabrice Rozie to promote the US publication of contemporary French titles. The goal is that by the end of 2008, 30 books—both fiction and non—published in France after 2000, would be published by American presses. The titles in this program are selected by a committee of French and American industry professionals and publishers publishing these titles receive $6,000 to offset translation fees. Books in the series will feature a logo designed by French artist Serge Bloch as a way of branding the series. Information about the program is available here including information about all eleven titles that have been included in the series so far.
• Finally, the Book Service of the French Embassy in New York also tours a number of French authors throughout America every year, which also helps increase awareness of contemporary French authors.
Quite an impressive list of activities, and this isn’t even everything. French Cultural Services also sponsors a lot of events, readings, panel discussions every year, often in collaboration with the French-American Foundation, which helps strengthen ties between the two countries and gives out the annual Florence Gould Translation Award for the best translation of a French literary work into English.
The Nature of Counting, or, the Numbers Racket
I stole the title for this post from an e-mail Eliot Weinberger sent me that points out a huge discrepancy between the name of this blog and the list of January 2008 translations.
As stated on our about us page, a number of studies—from the NEA, Bowker, etc.—have concluded that approx. 3% of all books published in the United States are in translation.
As Eliot pointed out, if that figure is accurate, I missed some 300+ books on the list this month . . . And this is using a conservative figure of 180,000 titles published in the U.S. According to the latest Bowker report, almost 300,000 books were published here in 2006.
In other words, the 18 translations I’m listing for January (including poetry and literary nonfiction) is less than 0.3% of the total output in the U.S. . . .
These figures do need to be parsed a bit, but even with a few qualifications and explanations, I think the results are pretty interesting.
First off, we’re really only tracking original translations of adult fiction, poetry, and some literary nonfiction. Some academic books are slipping through the cracks, and kids books have been totally excluded. (Really, there’s only so much time—if someone else wanted to provide this info, we could incorporate it.)
Also, I’m excluding re-translations and reprints of books that were previously published in the States, both of which are counted (I believe) in Bowker’s figures. Even so, I think that wouldn’t change my numbers all that much. A few Dalkey and NYRB titles added to the mix, but on the whole, over the year, this is a pretty small addition.
In terms of Bowker’s figures, the report above states that in 2006, 42,076 new works of adult fiction were published. So rather than base our percentages off the astronomical 180,000 or 300,000, it makes a lot more sense—to me at least—to focus on this number and just our fiction list.
(I’m willing to go out on a limb and state that I think this number should be representative of the whole and close to 3%. I can’t think of another category—history? cookbooks?—where the percentage of translations published would far exceed 3% and make up for any discrepancy. Unless Bowker counts language textbooks as translations or something wacky like that . . .)
So, there are approximately 3,500 new titles of adult fiction published every month. For January through March, I’ve counted 31 titles so far. Assuming I missed a bunch and we bump this up to 40 new translations, that’s still only 0.4% of all adult fiction published in the U.S.—less than half of the figure cited on our about us page, and nowhere near the oft-cited 3% figure.
Per Eliot’s suggestion, I think we should add an asterisk to our name . . .
Part of the reason for starting our monthly list was to try and get some more accurate data about the number of translations published in the States. Sure, it’ll never be 100% correct, but by the end of the year, the margin of error should be pretty low, and we’ll finally have some more concrete info with which to complain about the state of publishing. And with grumbling, good statistics are half the battle.
Sales of
Translations
Rachel Deahl’s 2008 article for Publishers Weekly on how well translations sell is really interesting (not just because we’re mentioned there) and worth expanding a bit.
The main idea comes from Tom Colchie, famous translator and literary agent (and all around nice guy), who thinks that the “doom and gloom about readers avoiding works in translation is off the mark”:
Colchie also believes that given the dearth of translations published in the U.S., their hit ratio is similar to, or better than, English-language titles. “If you take the performance of the 200 to 300 translations published a year and compare them to the performance of the 200,000-plus [American] titles published, you won’t see a big difference.”
(One of the first things that jumps out to me about this is that if his numbers are accurate, then even Eliot Weinberger’s belief that only 0.3% of books published in the U.S. are in translation is overblown. According to this, the figure is closer to 0.1%.)
Echoing my comment in the article, this seems to be a statistical game of sorts. Since there are so few translations published, a higher percentage of them “take off” compared to the percentage of American authors that become household names. (In other words, if 25 of 300 literary translations do well, that’s a much better percentage than the 500 or so American books out of the 40,000+ published annually that do really well.)
It’s an interesting argument to make, especially taken in combination with Colchie’s later statement—”I now sell fewer books in a year, but sell them for a lot more money.”
This comes as no surprise, but what he seems to be describing is a publishing industry more bottom-line conscious than ever. I believe that publishers are willing to shell out more cash for books from wherever that are capable of selling hundreds of thousands of copies. Instead of being a translation vs. English question, perhaps this experience is representative of how publishing functions in a marketplace where (thanks to chains, WalMart, etc.) at any point in time, twelve to twenty books are selling spectacularly well and are everywhere (a la Shadow of the Wind or The Da Vinci Code) while most everything else is puttering along.
I’m not sure exactly what to make of this. One the one hand, the more books published in translation, the better; on the other hand, Colchie’s saying that the sheer number of translated books is declining but that the number of best-selling titles that get translated is increasing. Which, as someone who doesn’t usually read best sellers, doesn’t appeal to me all that much.
Another interesting aspect of this article are the Nielsen numbers at the bottom. Nielsen numbers aren’t precise, and the arguments against this are well documented, but for the basis of comparison, it’s pretty illuminating. Of the four books cited, The Savage Detectives is the most clearly “literary” (in my elitist opinion) and sold 22,000 copies—a figure that is spectacular in terms of literary fiction, and demonstrates how much publicity and good attention Bolaño has been receiving—but that is still 55,000 copies lower than the next book on the list, Perez-Reverte’s The Queen of the South, which has sold 77,000 copies since 2004, and it’s dwarfed by Serra’s The Secret Supper’s 88,000 copies and The Shadow of the Wind’s 518,000.
An Economic Model for the Lack of Translations into English
Esther Allen—director of the Center for Literary Translation, and committee member for Open Letter—recently passed along a fascinating article entitled “The Impact of English Dominance on Literature and Welfare” by Jacques Melitz, and published in the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization back in late 2007.
There are many