considered translations of works into English as key to their country’s projection abroad but that access to the English-language book market appeared practically impossible. The expression “useful intermediary” used by Lithuania’s Laimantas Jonusys thus seems particularly appropriate. Books are translated into English despite their slender chances of ever reaching English-speaking readers. Rather, the aim is to get the attention of intermediaries who might foster their translation into languages (such as French and German) that are much more open to foreign writers.
That’s really a sad situation, although sort of cool to imagine a samizdat library of unpublished works translated into English floating around . . . (Actually, as I mentioned earlier, this is how we came to Bragi Olafsson’s The Pets. The Icelandic publisher paid to have it translated into English so that they could present it to more publishers.)
One of the difficulties in regard to using English as an intermediary language is the lack of translators capable of translating from “smaller languages” into English. Obviously, there are a slew of great Italian, German, French, and Spanish translators, but for languages like Lithuanian, Latvian, Estonian, Croatian, Macedonian, etc., there are only a handful of excellent literary translators. And this is just plain scary: “According to the UK PEN Center, there is no chance of attaining sufficient command of foreign languages in British schools and universities—something that is cause for great concern.”
For anyone interested in becoming a translator, the section on how much translators get paid on average is quite interesting. All the figures are in Euros, so you multiply by 1.5 to convert this into USD, but here are some stats for how much a translator can expect for translating a 150-page work. (Why 150 pages? I’m not sure, but this 150 number comes up time and again with the French government, so they probably started it . . . and there are probably 1,500 characters per page.) In France the translator could expect 2,925-3,375 Euros; in Britain, 4,423; Australia, 3,700; Holland, 6,712; Slovenia, 2,100; Macedonia, 1,300; Hungary, 1,000; and Lithuania, 945.
To put this into perspective, to earn $50,000 a year by translating in Britain, one would need to translate 8 works a year, or one every month and a half. This is why a lot of translators work in academia, or have some other source of income. And this is why subsidies and grants are so crucial.
Subsidies are another obstacle to publishing literature in translation. From a publisher’s perspective, translations are very costly because one not only has all the normal costs of doing a book, but also the additional cost of paying the translator, and, unfortunately, these books tend not to sell as well. (On the whole, literary fiction tends not to sell as well as other categories, and translations are a step below that.)
A number of countries around the world subsidize translations. These grants range from 50%-100% of the translation costs, with countries like The Netherlands, Finland, Estonia, Poland, Germany, France, Norway, Iceland, and Denmark, among others, funding many publications a year. Countries like Argentina, Macedonia, Russia, and Croatia, that have no such funding scheme are at a distinct disadvantage. From a purely commercial perspective, a publisher will usually go ahead with doing a book that’s either going to sell very well, or has a nice subsidy attached to it. As if things weren’t already difficult enough, this is another obstacle for “smaller nations” to overcome in order to reach a wider, English-speaking audience.
Simona does a great job nailing the current state of publishing:
Both the publishing and retail sides of the book business in the English-speaking world are dominated by conglomerates and chains. Two multinationals—the German Bertelsmann group and the French Hachette group have the lion’s share of the publishing market. Both groups focus on best sellers. Authors receive vast sums for such works. However, there is also a new trend in the UK—non-author best sellers. For example, even a firm like Bloomsbury has stooped to publishing ghost-written autobiographies of football players and fashion models. This is the “literature” of the masses with a vengeance and nothing, it seems, can detain its juggernaut career through the industry. The most translated works are detective stories or tales of an erotic, even pornographic nature. One should note here that such works are not considered great literature but rather exotic foreign variations on a theme.
Sounds like something from one of Dubravka Ugresic’s essays . . .
The final point that interested me in this essay is the breakdown of sales levels in various countries, which, despite having populations that are 1/100 of America, have sales figures that aren’t that much different. In Lithuania, the average print run is 2,000; in Slovenia, sales for works of fiction are between 1,000 and 1,500 copies and 400-600 for quality fiction; and in Mexico, sales rarely exceed 3,000 copies.
Putting these pieces together—small sales, few translators getting paid low wages, dominance of the book business by conglomerates looking to publish best-selling thrillers and porn—it’s a wonder anything at all gets published in translation. And as a corollary, it’s no surprise that in the 2008 translation database I’ve been putting together, combined, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, HarperCollins, Random House, Penguin, and Simon & Schuster account for 12% of all the original translations I’ve identified so far. In comparison, Archipelago, New York Review Books, New Directions, Dalkey Archive, and Open Letter account for 13%.
Case Studies – The Netherlands
These case studies were written by various experts in their respective countries (frequently associated with the local PEN center) in response to a questionnaire (found on pgs. 46-47) that tried to get at the state of literary translation into and out of a particular language, the role of translators in that particular country, funding for translations, and more.
Bas Pauw of the Foundation for the Production and Translation of Dutch Literature wrote the section on Dutch literature, hitting on a few points that come up in the other case studies as well. I feel like I’m beating a dead horse, but even in The Netherlands, there’s a lack of solid publishing data.
The last year for which reliable and detailed figures were published was 1996. In that year, 651 works of Dutch fiction were published: novels, stories, and novellas. In the same year, 774 works of translated fiction were published by Dutch publishers. Detectives and thrillers are not included in these figures.
According to the Amsterdam-based Foundation for Book Research, translated fiction generally makes up about 45% of the total fiction published in Dutch in an average year. (That figure was apparently reversed in 1996. . .)
There is nothing specific about Dutch literature being translated into English, although Pauw does say, “Dutch authors are in general still relatively invisible in the international Republic of Letters,” a statement backed up by the Center for Book Culture data (18 works of Dutch literature translated into English between 2000-2006) and only one title (Arnon Grunberg’s The Jewish Messiah) in our 2008 translation database.
This isn’t for lack of trying though. The list of activities undertaken by the NLPVF is quite impressive, and they do fund up to 70% of the translation costs for publishers interested in doing a Dutch book.
Here are some of the activities Pauw cites as keys to helping spread Dutch literature throughout the world:
• Presence at book fairs, including Frankfurt and London—as someone who typically meets with the NLPVF at these fairs, I can vouch for the fact that these face-to-face meetings are crucial to cultivating the necessary relationships that lead to Dutch books getting published in translation;
• Writers’ Program, which supports Dutch authors appearing abroad;
• Visitors’ Program, in which 8-10 publishers a year are invited to come to Amsterdam for a few days to meet with publishers. (I’ve participated in a version of this, which greatly,
