So, in order not to lose the information that I shared yesterday in a thread of tweets on the bird site, in response to a provocatively wide-ranging New York Times roundtable by Juliana Barbassa (“‘Building Something Together’: Translators on Their Art”) with Samantha Schnee, Allison Markin Powell, Jeremy Tiang, Mui Poopaksakul, and Bruna Dantas Lobato, I am putting it here in a blog post, for perpetuity, so to speak.
The subject, to be clear, is how state funding influences the translation of literary works into English, and specifically how a few European languages, with heavy state backing, dominate. I will leave it to others to expound on this (including the ways in which this represents legacies of colonialism, imperialism, the Cold War, etc.) and in fact look forward to that!
To recapitulate, then, reading the roundtable, I had many thoughts—so many that I got overwhelmed, because everyone in the interview said things I thought were important and worthy of commenting on. Writing a thread on Twitter takes a long time, though, and I was conscious of not wanting to spend too much (unpaid) time on that, given my current work obligations, so I limited myself to commenting on just one point one of the participants made with a fairly bare-bones thread of data on just one language to illustrate the point.
That point was to uplift what Jeremy Tiang said about translation in English not being a level playing field:
JEREMY: I want to mention the unevenness of the playing field, which might not be apparent to people outside of the translation world.
Someone working from, say, German could quite feasibly, if they were sufficiently established, make a living simply by waiting for publishers to come to them with German books to translate. Whereas with less represented languages or regions, the translator often has to advocate for the book or it doesn’t get translated at all. Thai literature in English translation pretty much wouldn’t exist if Mui weren’t finding these books and putting them in front of publishers.
What I wrote in my Twitter thread was that to say the playing field is uneven is an understatement. As I noted there, I don’t have the data at hand on the amounts of the funding, but to illustrate beyond the example that Jeremy gives, which is about German, the dominance of translations from French is in large part a result of the French state's funding to subsidize translations.
To give readers a sense of the extent of this funding, I shared this post from Three Percent, the blog by Chad Post, publisher of Open Letter, who has written consistently about these matters over the years and who remains a great source of information on data concerning publishing of fiction translation in the United States. As I noted in my tweet, that post is from 2008, so the information isn’t current, but it serves to give an idea of the extent of French state funding to support the translation of French fiction into English in the U.S. market.
Again, as I noted on Twitter, the dominance of French fiction of course also has to do with US (and UK) editors’ familiarity with French language and culture, which in turn similarly results from funding (for example, of French departments and teacher training). But state financial support of translations, in all the ways noted in Chad’s blog post, is still the biggest factor (or at least so I believe; perhaps impossible to prove).
Here note that I put UK in parentheses above. This is because the market for fiction translated into English is not only in the United States, but also in the United Kingdom, and in fact elsewhere around the world—these days more than ever, including not only India (English translations of most of the literature written in the many languages of that country are published in India itself, since US and UK publishers have been slow/reluctant to acquire them), but also many other, smaller countries whose fiction, for many reasons (again, possibly ranging from the subject matter or style not being considered interesting by US or UK publishers, to the lack of state subsidies for translated works) has not been published in large numbers in the US or UK.
Below I present some recent data to illustrate just how dominant French is in the US market for fiction translated into English. Note that these are US data only, and do not include books published in the UK or elsewhere. The data come from the Translation Database, “founded in 2008 by Three Percent and Open Letter Books at the University of Rochester to track all original publications of fiction and poetry published in the U.S. in English translation.” (Note my caveat that not all the books translated from French are from France, so not all of them are eligible for the funding I refer to above.)
2022 70
2021 100
2020 134
2019 145
2018 133
To give readers an idea of just how dominant these figures are, I offered a comparison with the other members of FIGS (French, Italian, German, Spanish, borrowing a usage from Anton Hur):
Italian
2022 32
2021 34
2020 41
2019 46
2018 48
German
2022 29
2021 40
2020 70
2019 73
2018 74
Spanish
2022 70
2021 90
2020 86
2019 101
2018 123
Then I offered, for further comparison, a few other languages:
Chinese
2022 17
2021 23
2020 22
2019 28
2018 33
Japanese
2022 29
2021 23
2020 33
2019 47
2018 64
Korean
2022 12
2021 11
2020 15
2019 17
2018 11
(Here, a Slavic section . . .)
Russian
2022 13
2021 10
2020 18
2019 28
2018 25
Ukrainian
2022 3
2021 4
2020 5
2019 5
2018 4
Polish
2022 5
2021 13
2020 10
2019 9
2018 16
Czech
2022 1
2021 7
2020 3
2019 4
2018 9
And, finally (though, as I pleaded on Twitter, fearing in advance that people would complain I left out other important examples, please don’t harsh on me for not being exhaustive), I offered the six biggest languages of India (in my thread I mistakenly said five)—and though I neglected to mention it on Twitter, these all have over 55 million speakers(!), and that’s only counting people who speak them as their first language, which means they are larger than every country in Europe except Germany, the UK, France, and Italy:
Hindi
2022 0
2021 0
2020 0
2019 1
2018 1
Bengali
2022 0
2021 1
2020 2
2019 3
2018 4
Marathi
2022 0
2021 0
2020 0
2019 0
2018 0
Telugu (no entries)
Tamil
2022 1
2021 0
2020 0
2019 2
2018 2
Gujarati
2022 1
2021 0
2020 0
2019 0
2018 0
In my Twitter thread, I repeated my caveat that I was aware of the limitations of the data I was sharing and that my goal was just to give an idea of the disproportion to people who may have never thought about it before. (In other words, not a thread for the hardcore!)
As of this writing, there have been two replies I want to include, one from the new not-for-profit publishing house trace, who noted that “US comp lit programs rooted in postwar & cold war politics” were another reason for the unequal distribution of literature in English translation and that that was a motivation for their launching the press (“despite the HUGE challenges in funding”) and the other from translator Shaun Whiteside, who noted, absolutely correctly, that Germany also offers “v[ery] generous” funding to support translation into English of fiction written in German.
So, there you have it. Now, if you want, you can bookmark this blog post, and the info won’t be lost on Twitter. 😊
