Pierre Assouline’s excellent blog at Le Monde “has some figures”:http://passouline.blog.lemonde.fr/2007/03/17/langlais-regne-en-librairie/ for the provenance of novels published in French translation:
bq. in 2006, 41.4% of novels published in France were translated from a foreign language…. English is, naturally, in first place with 2503 titles but the extent of English domination is surprising: 75.5 per cent of the total! In the runners-up spot are German and Spanish with 134 titles (4%), followed by Italian (108 titles or 3.3%). Juste après, on trouve l’allemand et l’espagnol avec 134 titres (soit 4%) suivis par l’italien (108 titres soit 3,3%). …. Russian (which is in decline) and the languages of the East [meaning? CB] are neck and neck (with 44 titles translated in the year), then come the Scandinavian languages and Japanese. The only notable breakthrough is the Chinese novel, with 37 titles translated.
{ 9 comments }
~~~~ 03.17.07 at 10:09 am
…the languages of the East [meaning? CB]
Googling “les langues de l’est” suggests he means Eastern Europe.
Chris Bertram 03.17.07 at 10:12 am
I guess that’s right. But bundling Bulgarian, Hungarian, Polish and Romanian together for statistical purposes is somewhat bizarre!
~~~~ 03.17.07 at 10:13 am
(Including Hungarian, so it does not mean “Slavic languages”.)
Aidan Kehoe 03.17.07 at 12:37 pm
The comment from Marc Galan saying that English-language publishing has revenues of €21 billion while the figure for publishing in France is €1.8 billion, does give a reasonable ground for lots of translation from English, I think.
abb1 03.17.07 at 12:51 pm
Why, Eastern Europe is a geographical region. ‘African languages’, for example.
Matt 03.17.07 at 1:01 pm
I’d be interested to see how these numbers compared to the number of novels published in the various languages, perhaps with some adjustment for they type of novels that are likely to be translated (don’t ask me how to figure that out, a mixture of style and type of press, maybe.) I’d not be surprised if there was a strong correlation.
Barry 03.17.07 at 5:23 pm
“I guess that’s right. But bundling Bulgarian, Hungarian, Polish and Romanian together for statistical purposes is somewhat bizarre!”
Posted by Chris Bertram
Why? They all the same :)
Remember the old British saying, ‘wogs start at Calais’?
Stewart Rowe 03.18.07 at 8:50 pm
Recently I have been reading Lawrence Lessig’s “Avenir des Idees” which is available on the web only in French. I was surprised by how easy it was to read (I’m 60-plus years from my last French lesson and 30 years from my liast visit to Switzerland). The reason? To me, the text appeared surprisingly American-English in style — English-style grammar, frequent use of words closely related to English words. Perhaps this was a matter of convenience in translating from the original English, or perhaps just the style of these translators. But the general feeling I had was of the difference with my remembrance from years ago. Take a look and see if you get the same feeling.
Doug 03.18.07 at 9:10 pm
On the other hand, translated from English takes in a great many countries and traditions. Sure, Pinter won the Nobel in 2005, but how many more laureates do you have to go through before you get to another English-speaker born in England? Coetzee, 2003, South Africa; Naipaul, 2001, Trinidad; Heaney, 1995, Ireland; Morrison, 1993, USA; Walcott, 1992, St. Lucia; Gordimer, 1991, South Africa; Golding, 1983, England. Six laureates and nearly a quater of a century. No other language comes even close, and given the depth and breadth of the contemporary literary tradition in English, it’s no surprise at all that translation from English should dominate so handily.
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