The claim that only about 3 percent of all books published in the United States (with Great Britain occasionally thrown in for good measure) are translations has gained a great deal of currency over the past decade and continues to be widely cited. It appears, however, to be an essentially anecdotal statistic, only very roughly based on any actual data and, beyond its shock value, is of only limited use.
Even a baseline—a percentage of what, exactly?—is difficult to determine with any accuracy. The “traditional print book output” in the United States was estimated in 2011 to be 347,178 (translations are not counted separately). This includes new editions of previously published work, including paperback editions of last year’s hardcovers.
1 Self-publishing and print-on-demand, the bulk of it being public domain works, accounted for more than a million additional titles published in 2011, further inflating and complicating the numbers.
UNESCO’s Index Translationum is billed as a World Bibliography of Translation but is marred by the often inadequate data submitted to it.
2 In 2008, the most recent year for which data are available, the United States had 1,431 translated titles. Year-to-year disparities (2,195 translated titles in 2007), which are even more pronounced in the case of other nations, also suggest that the database is, at best, incomplete. In addition are the many duplicate entries and new editions of previously published translations. All in all, the Index Translationum offers only very limited guidance as to how much—and what—has been translated into English in any given year.
The Translation Database kept at Three Percent is currently the most comprehensive effort to track translations in the United States.
3 Maintained since 2008, the database counts all new translations of adult fiction and poetry that are published in the United States. This is by no means a complete register, however, as it does not include any nonfiction, children’s literature, cookbooks, or religious and reference works, which account for a significant number of translations annually. It also does not include either new editions—or new translations—of previously translated work, which make up a large percentage of the titles in translation published each year. Because the database is limited to titles that are published or have a distributor in the United States, it also does not include many titles translated into English but published elsewhere, even though many of these books are readily available to American readers via online vendors and distributors.
Nevertheless, the database offers a good crude idea of how much new trade fiction is published in translation in the United States every year—the books that you might find at your local bookstore or that your library stocks. Astonishingly, for 2014 only 494 works of fiction, including anthologies, are listed; in 2013 there were only 448. In addition, translations from three languages—French, German, and Spanish—dominate, routinely accounting together for more than 40 percent of all translations.
Additional translations into English that are published abroad—mainly in India, but also elsewhere—add to the worldwide total, but by any calculation, translation into English lags far behind that into other major languages. Precise foreign data also are difficult to find, but by comparison, the German Publishers and Booksellers Association, for example, reports that out of 81,919 new releases in Germany in 2013, 10,731 were translations into German—although these totals include nonfiction and children’s literature.
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