about the state of publishing. And with grumbling, good statistics are half the battle.
Sales of
Translations
Rachel Deahl’s 2008 article for Publishers Weekly on how well translations sell is really interesting (not just because we’re mentioned there) and worth expanding a bit.
The main idea comes from Tom Colchie, famous translator and literary agent (and all around nice guy), who thinks that the “doom and gloom about readers avoiding works in translation is off the mark”:
Colchie also believes that given the dearth of translations published in the U.S., their hit ratio is similar to, or better than, English-language titles. “If you take the performance of the 200 to 300 translations published a year and compare them to the performance of the 200,000-plus [American] titles published, you won’t see a big difference.”
(One of the first things that jumps out to me about this is that if his numbers are accurate, then even Eliot Weinberger’s belief that only 0.3% of books published in the U.S. are in translation is overblown. According to this, the figure is closer to 0.1%.)
Echoing my comment in the article, this seems to be a statistical game of sorts. Since there are so few translations published, a higher percentage of them “take off” compared to the percentage of American authors that become household names. (In other words, if 25 of 300 literary translations do well, that’s a much better percentage than the 500 or so American books out of the 40,000+ published annually that do really well.)
It’s an interesting argument to make, especially taken in combination with Colchie’s later statement—”I now sell fewer books in a year, but sell them for a lot more money.”
This comes as no surprise, but what he seems to be describing is a publishing industry more bottom-line conscious than ever. I believe that publishers are willing to shell out more cash for books from wherever that are capable of selling hundreds of thousands of copies. Instead of being a translation vs. English question, perhaps this experience is representative of how publishing functions in a marketplace where (thanks to chains, WalMart, etc.) at any point in time, twelve to twenty books are selling spectacularly well and are everywhere (a la Shadow of the Wind or The Da Vinci Code) while most everything else is puttering along.
I’m not sure exactly what to make of this. One the one hand, the more books published in translation, the better; on the other hand, Colchie’s saying that the sheer number of translated books is declining but that the number of best-selling titles that get translated is increasing. Which, as someone who doesn’t usually read best sellers, doesn’t appeal to me all that much.
Another interesting aspect of this article are the Nielsen numbers at the bottom. Nielsen numbers aren’t precise, and the arguments against this are well documented, but for the basis of comparison, it’s pretty illuminating. Of the four books cited, The Savage Detectives is the most clearly “literary” (in my elitist opinion) and sold 22,000 copies—a figure that is spectacular in terms of literary fiction, and demonstrates how much publicity and good attention Bolaño has been receiving—but that is still 55,000 copies lower than the next book on the list, Perez-Reverte’s The Queen of the South, which has sold 77,000 copies since 2004, and it’s dwarfed by Serra’s The Secret Supper’s 88,000 copies and The Shadow of the Wind’s 518,000.
An Economic Model for the Lack of Translations into English
Esther Allen—director of the Center for Literary Translation, and committee member for Open Letter—recently passed along a fascinating article entitled “The Impact of English Dominance on Literature and Welfare” by Jacques Melitz, and published in the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization back in late 2007.
There are many interesting things about this article, starting with the fact that an economist decided to investigate and write about the difficulty of getting books translated into English.
Before getting too far into this, I have to admit that although I did pretty well in my recent Economics class, it’s the only graduate Econ class I’ve ever had, so please keep that in mind if you read my attempt below to summarize this article (which is available in its entirety via the link above).
This article starts off with a noble argument:
Quite precisely, my argument will be that the tendency of an integrated world market to privilege the translation of English fiction and poetry into other languages for reading or listening enjoyment may damage the production of world literature and in this respect make us all worse off.
Right on. And something we all tacitly understand—English is the dominant world language (for now), therefore it’s easier to get books translated from English into “smaller” languages than it is to go from the “small” language to English. What’s interesting about this particular article is the reasoning and explanations Melitz presents as to why this works out.
(Again, disclaimer re: my real econ knowledge—read section 3 to get a better description.) Repeating my mantra of last month, Melitz starts from the premise that all publishers function under the “profit-maximizing condition” of setting marginal cost (the amount it costs to make the next unit) equal to marginal revenue (the amount of revenue you can gain by selling the next unit). This is a basic economic principle setting forth the conditions for maximizing a firm’s profit.
As we all know, it costs more to publish a book in translation. In his mathematical model, Melitz uses F to equal the “flat payment to the author for his time” (I’m reading this as the lowest possible advance given to a book making its way into publication) and “in-house expenses of selecting and editing a manuscript.” For translations, he replaces F with Ctr + C*, which is equal to the cost of translating a work plus the cost of selecting and editing a book in translation.
What this boils down to is that if Ctr + C* > F for the lowest selling book published by a firm, than the house will not publish that book in translation. (Still, no real surprises, just new language, which fits my working theory of the real value of business school—new definitions.)
Applying this model, books that get published in translation (either in English or another language), are titles that will have projected sales that are equal to, or greater than, the lowest projected sales for a work written in English. So only the most popular, best-selling books get translated from other languages into English:
As one student of the publishing industry observes: “Not surprisingly, what people most want to read [in translation] are other people’s best-selling literature” (Curwen, The World Book Industry).
All of this is logical—if not a bit depressing and maybe a bit off, especially when you get to real data and realize that indie presses are publishing 10 times the works in translation that the big commercial houses are, and that these books frequently were not best-sellers in their original language, but well, that’s why we started the 2008 translation database and why relying on stats from UNESCO only get you so far—but, here’s where things get a little weird in his argument.
By applying such an industrial, economic model to publishing (which, for those in the know, is for the most part, not all that economically sound) one of the conclusions reached is that more books will be translated from English into other languages because a) these best-sellers have succeeded against greater odds, and b) that it’s cheaper (in terms of C*) to translate 10 books from 1 language than 10 books from 10 different languages.
The second point is true in terms of fixed costs—just think of the number of editors necessary—and
