Bad Times for Translation?

Posted on January 06, 2011 by Scott Esposito

According to Chad Post--keeper of the mighty Three Percent translation database--the number of translations of poetry and prose into English in the past three years has been in sharp decline. He writes, with his usual verve:

Unless I went blind, or missed two months worth of releases,3 total number of new translations was way down. Like down by 40 titles, or 11%. This is not cool.

And this is the trend from 2008 to 2010 is a pretty steady decline, in spite of all the media attention paid to Bolano, to translation as a whole, etc., etc. Despite all the best efforts of all the best people who are out there championing international literature. This scares me.

Chad's about as well-informed on these matters as you can get, so barring some weird statistical fluke, it looks like this is the case.

What does all this mean? It's hard to say, but here are some ideas.

Chad further parses the data to show that, by and large, it's the same few publishers doing the lion's share of the work, and that their numbers have remained fairly consistent. If that's true, then these trends could be the result of really small, 1- and 2-book per year publishers going out of business during the recession. There's also the likelihood of larger publishers moving toward English-language titles, which they tend to perceive as safer and less expensive to produce.

Of course, this could also just be statistical fluctuation. Three years of data isn't a huge data set, and it's possible that on a longer time scale this movement would just look like regular movement. In that case, I'll be interested to see what Chad's translation database says about 2011. (And if anyone out there has access to data sets for years before 2008, I'd love to hear about it.)

We should also keep in mind that titles published is just one measure. As Chad indicated, 2010 was another strong year for translation being talked about in the mainstream press and for translated authors being bought and praised. From those vantage points, 2010 might be looking better than recent years.