'3 percent, 60 percent: the singularity of English in the world of translation' - this is a brilliant article giving an overview of the global translation situation indicating how translation patterns parallel patterns of globalisation (and also global governance).
One reason that literary translation is not flourishing more in the UK is the negative impact of national research governance structures and the related institutional risk management of the last three decades on literary translation.
Essentially the research governance processes have marginalised literary translation and although this problem of the official national recognition of translation as a recognised research output to demonstrate that you are research active academic has begun to be addressed it will take longer for institutions to overcome their negative perceptions towards literary translation as scholarship fearing what score it might receive under the national research review, even if the disciplines themselves would actually welcome translations as scholarship (my discipline is international studies).
I enjoyed it, many intriguing numbers and observations. Regarding the Russian, French and Spanish, strictly statistically speaking you cannot call them outliers - there are too few data points on the graph to authoritatively decide where is the trend and where are the outliers. I found your article because I just published a text where the 3% number gets quoted. My argument is that the 3% is the result of relative lack of interest in foreign cultures in the anglosaxon world. But that is not the only possible argument to make. Link below:
Hi, thanks so much for reading. You are right about the "outliers"--I think I meant they are outliers from the perspective of the curve the authors think best fits the distribution of the data points. The real point should be: these are languages that for whatever reason--and I think the reason has something to do with their cultural importance--have a high number of incoming translations, and this might require some explanation. There is nothing weird about it: but we should have an account of the difference between how English operates and how these operate.
I will check out your post, so interesting that we are both thinking about this just now.
I really enjoyed this article. One question it leaves me with: is there any way to measure how uniform “anglophone values” actually are? It strikes me that the disagreement with Pym and Chrupala may hinge on an unargued premise: that English publications represent a unified culture. If this is granted, it makes sense to treat the quantity of English books published as an indicator of the hegemony of that culture. But, on the other hand, if the mass of publications in a given language represent multiple cultures with different value system, then the total number of publications in that language would not indicate the hegemony of any particular culture.
This is the point where I lose the argument because I’m not sure how we would decide between these two interpretations of a body of publications in a language.
The question about the possibility of measuring "anglophone values" and whether English-language publications represent a unified culture is great. I think you are right about there being a cultural plurality represented by any language in which there is a market for books, and definitely by English.
Just how plural the translation flows are in terms of culture is something we would want to remain agnostic about, however, at least for the purpose of these explorations. Part of the reason why I don't think this framework can address the culture question is that while we can relatively easily agree on what texts are in the same language, we could endlessly debate what publication is or is not part of the same culture, and to what extent. If we conflated culture with language, we will need to fix that.
So maybe trying to isolate cultures as distinct entities is not a productive way forward here. It may work for different eras, not so much for ours? It may work as a crude shorthand but not as a taxonomy of people or utterances.
What we are trying to write about here is languages, regardless of what the "content" of the circulation in that language might be. When we talk about domination we understand it simply in quantitative terms. Obviously, the linguistic dominance or hegemony of English can be seen as providing the infrastructure for ideological and cultural domination, but such crude statistics won't reveal much about the specifics of that.
Venuti's argument about *literary* translations (especially if we make some modifications to his formulations), does nevertheless seem to make sense to me, even though we did not have enough space to really think about that problem. And you are probably right that the gesture to that disagreement between V and P&C was not helpful here.
I still think we can meaningfully suggest that there is an accelerated dissemination of ideas, interests, cultural practices, intellectual habits, that have a recognizably Anglo-American, and increasingly: American origin, and that these have a transformative effect on the world.
Literary forms or styles are a part of this picture. My vague, impressionistic sense is that the large-scale export of contemporary English-language fiction, its domination of contemporary world literature (i.e. literature read in multiple languages) has a flattening effect on the production of fiction world-wide, reducing the array of formal options. (A bunch of people have suggested this, including Tim Parks, whom Milena Billik mentions on a different thread, although examples would be anecdotal.)
This may have less to do with any cultural homogeneity on the ground, and more with the machinery of American publishing--the Big Five publishing houses dominate not only the American book market but also what gets translated into other languages.
In any case: thanks for thinking about it--this is a huge question we have not handled very well.
Thank you for the very thoughtful response! I’m not very knowledgeable about contemporary literary production, so I’m mostly only able to suggest questions that strike as important. That said, I pretty much agree with everything you say here.
I guess for thinking about whether English language dominance has a flattening effect I would want to know has English publishing crowded out forms of mass literacy that proceeded it in other languages? Or did the industries that support mass literacy get their start in English and then spread from English to other languages? To the extent that the second diffusionist account hold, does English flatten cultural production by inspiring everyone to imitate the same things, and to what extent does it increase the possibilities for diverse cultural production by stimulating the development of publication industries that can then support different kinds of authors?
I would want to know more about the incentives for particular translators. Like in the US I would guess that a lot of translations by the big publishers into English are popular novels that are chosen because they are close to existing formulas for popular novels. I could argue that these are less likely to increase the diversity of ideas and values and styles (whatever that means exactly). But other translations are done by scholars who are specifically trying to access very different world views with their work. (I can say that among Western languages, English is a fantastic research language for Classical Chinese texts.) Other translations are done by religious organizations that are trying to bring a specific worldview into English; Buddhist texts, for instance, are exceptionally well translated in English because of Buddhists following injunctions to spread the scriptures. There are probably more types than this. I suggest that these different kinds of translation efforts are qualitatively different enough that they would have to be considered to know how significant cultural exchange through translation is.
I’m very curious how China fits into this. I think Mandarin is probably the second biggest publication language, and looking very quickly online they seem to have a translation rate of around 12% of books published, though I’m not at all sure about these numbers. My guess is that they also have a pretty low rate per publication of translation into other languages., at least into English. I study the history of Chinese philosophy, so this is something I’m curious about.
The idea of ideas having an Anglo-American origin is also tricky since I would imagine English also acts as a hub such that ideas get translated into English and then from English to other languages.
Probably there are significant limits on how thoroughly or definitively any of these questions can be answered, but this is what your article and comment make me think about.
Thanks. All this helps me (us) think about this more. And to give a full answer to all your questions one would need to research and write a book... Quickly, working backwards:
Mandarin (or China, depending on whether you look at languages or countries) seems to have this very lopsided character, lots of books published, lots translated into mandarin, and (especially proportionally speaking) vanishingly few books translated from mandarin. It definitely shows that the various metrics are not at all necessarily functions of each other: publishing more does not make you being translated more, and translating more does not result in more outgoing translations, either. Politics is a massive factor here, and the translation patterns also seem to fit in well with what one knows about the massive expansion of Chinese higher education.
The channels of translation are also a fascinating area, and you obviously know much more about Classical Chinese than I ever hope to. This kind of very crude big picture account cannot possibly discern these differences--very little contemporary literature translated from mandarin, or from China, especially compared to how enormous that literary universe is does not contradict the fact that Classical Chinese is well translated. English-language academic publishing is globally dominant, maybe even more than in the realm of fiction--and the translations you mention are probably scholarly works, so they fall under this category. This is true across all classical languages, I think, not just Chinese: scholarly editions translations are published in English, and--by now less often--in German or French. Everyone in the world uses those. There is a complete Homer, maybe Plato in many other languages, Horace, Vergil, most of Ovid, maybe even a complete Aristotle, but then much of the rest is not available in good translation. Whereas in English, there is the Loeb Classical Library--editions plus translations of pretty much everything that survives (and is studied at all).
But then again, the entire Loeb Classical Library is probably not bigger than the number of foreign books translated into English any given year. The written world is expanding so quickly.
The small number of books translated into English is a relative figure, a percentage. But in absolute terms, it is not that small--and it is a long tradition, with deep backlist of titles you can get from the library. The percentage issue becomes a problem vis-a-vis contemporary output. There is an explosion of contemporary writing the levels of translation don't keep up with. The historical canon, or even the historical corpus, is comparatively small, and is becoming proportionally smaller as we speak.
Similar things might apply to religious institutions and organizations.
About English: mass literacy is one factor, population size another, and political power a third. English was comparable to French and German, and probably bigger than Spanish, Italian, definitely than Russian, by maybe 1900 (I am just guessing here, no figures). It really started to take off after WW1, and became super dominant after WW2. The cold war was part of it. A complicated story I am only trying to understand.
So many dimensions.
I would love to know more about the Chinese case. For example about the transformation that seems to have taken place after the 1980s. Translation history is a vast subject, and we are only beginning to teach ourselves about it.
Thanks for another fascinating reply. I wish I knew more about modern publishing. China does seem like it could be interesting case study for how the established English language industry interacted with the rapidly emerging Chinese language publishing industry. This discussion arouses my curiosity about how that happened.
Yu Hua, the novelist, has a nice essay that has been translated about how massive a shift it was to go from his childhood reading official communist books (the only ones available) solely for the footnote biographies to having books everywhere, including folks trying to sell him counterfeits of his own books on the street. Whatever happened sure was big.
I’ll look forward to reading more of your publications.
Thank you--I will try to find that essay, but if you remember where you saw it in translation, please let me know. And yes, that would be a fascinating thing to even begin to look into. We know so little.
Absolutely fantastic post on the global flow of translations. So informative, so thought provoking. I have so many--not so much questions as just general areas I'd like to know more about.
Lots of curiosity about the relation between patterns of translations and patterns of population (predictably). Japanese appears to have a fairly large internal literary market relative to the population of speakers (at least as compared to, e.g., Spanish) and a low proportion of translations; is there a case to be made for literary protectionism for languages that are, where translation is concerned, already peripheral?
Also curious about the relationship between being a literary exporter and a cultural exporter, e.g., South Korea has obviously become a major cultural exporter... but are its literary exports picking up as a result? Korean is the only language course at Duke to have increased enrollments in the last decade or so, so one might expect so. I understand that Turkish TV is also a major export with lots of links to the Arab world.
And about the relationship between number of translations / number volumes total: are bestsellers big enough to shift the patterns, or not?
'3 percent, 60 percent: the singularity of English in the world of translation' - this is a brilliant article giving an overview of the global translation situation indicating how translation patterns parallel patterns of globalisation (and also global governance).
One reason that literary translation is not flourishing more in the UK is the negative impact of national research governance structures and the related institutional risk management of the last three decades on literary translation.
Essentially the research governance processes have marginalised literary translation and although this problem of the official national recognition of translation as a recognised research output to demonstrate that you are research active academic has begun to be addressed it will take longer for institutions to overcome their negative perceptions towards literary translation as scholarship fearing what score it might receive under the national research review, even if the disciplines themselves would actually welcome translations as scholarship (my discipline is international studies).
I have written an article addressing this UK academic problem over recognising translations. https://vanessapupavac.substack.com/p/translation-in-uk-international-studies
I enjoyed it, many intriguing numbers and observations. Regarding the Russian, French and Spanish, strictly statistically speaking you cannot call them outliers - there are too few data points on the graph to authoritatively decide where is the trend and where are the outliers. I found your article because I just published a text where the 3% number gets quoted. My argument is that the 3% is the result of relative lack of interest in foreign cultures in the anglosaxon world. But that is not the only possible argument to make. Link below:
https://nomadicmind.substack.com/p/worlds-we-dont-see
Hi, thanks so much for reading. You are right about the "outliers"--I think I meant they are outliers from the perspective of the curve the authors think best fits the distribution of the data points. The real point should be: these are languages that for whatever reason--and I think the reason has something to do with their cultural importance--have a high number of incoming translations, and this might require some explanation. There is nothing weird about it: but we should have an account of the difference between how English operates and how these operate.
I will check out your post, so interesting that we are both thinking about this just now.
I really enjoyed this article. One question it leaves me with: is there any way to measure how uniform “anglophone values” actually are? It strikes me that the disagreement with Pym and Chrupala may hinge on an unargued premise: that English publications represent a unified culture. If this is granted, it makes sense to treat the quantity of English books published as an indicator of the hegemony of that culture. But, on the other hand, if the mass of publications in a given language represent multiple cultures with different value system, then the total number of publications in that language would not indicate the hegemony of any particular culture.
This is the point where I lose the argument because I’m not sure how we would decide between these two interpretations of a body of publications in a language.
The question about the possibility of measuring "anglophone values" and whether English-language publications represent a unified culture is great. I think you are right about there being a cultural plurality represented by any language in which there is a market for books, and definitely by English.
Just how plural the translation flows are in terms of culture is something we would want to remain agnostic about, however, at least for the purpose of these explorations. Part of the reason why I don't think this framework can address the culture question is that while we can relatively easily agree on what texts are in the same language, we could endlessly debate what publication is or is not part of the same culture, and to what extent. If we conflated culture with language, we will need to fix that.
So maybe trying to isolate cultures as distinct entities is not a productive way forward here. It may work for different eras, not so much for ours? It may work as a crude shorthand but not as a taxonomy of people or utterances.
What we are trying to write about here is languages, regardless of what the "content" of the circulation in that language might be. When we talk about domination we understand it simply in quantitative terms. Obviously, the linguistic dominance or hegemony of English can be seen as providing the infrastructure for ideological and cultural domination, but such crude statistics won't reveal much about the specifics of that.
Venuti's argument about *literary* translations (especially if we make some modifications to his formulations), does nevertheless seem to make sense to me, even though we did not have enough space to really think about that problem. And you are probably right that the gesture to that disagreement between V and P&C was not helpful here.
I still think we can meaningfully suggest that there is an accelerated dissemination of ideas, interests, cultural practices, intellectual habits, that have a recognizably Anglo-American, and increasingly: American origin, and that these have a transformative effect on the world.
Literary forms or styles are a part of this picture. My vague, impressionistic sense is that the large-scale export of contemporary English-language fiction, its domination of contemporary world literature (i.e. literature read in multiple languages) has a flattening effect on the production of fiction world-wide, reducing the array of formal options. (A bunch of people have suggested this, including Tim Parks, whom Milena Billik mentions on a different thread, although examples would be anecdotal.)
This may have less to do with any cultural homogeneity on the ground, and more with the machinery of American publishing--the Big Five publishing houses dominate not only the American book market but also what gets translated into other languages.
In any case: thanks for thinking about it--this is a huge question we have not handled very well.
What do you think?
Thank you for the very thoughtful response! I’m not very knowledgeable about contemporary literary production, so I’m mostly only able to suggest questions that strike as important. That said, I pretty much agree with everything you say here.
I guess for thinking about whether English language dominance has a flattening effect I would want to know has English publishing crowded out forms of mass literacy that proceeded it in other languages? Or did the industries that support mass literacy get their start in English and then spread from English to other languages? To the extent that the second diffusionist account hold, does English flatten cultural production by inspiring everyone to imitate the same things, and to what extent does it increase the possibilities for diverse cultural production by stimulating the development of publication industries that can then support different kinds of authors?
I would want to know more about the incentives for particular translators. Like in the US I would guess that a lot of translations by the big publishers into English are popular novels that are chosen because they are close to existing formulas for popular novels. I could argue that these are less likely to increase the diversity of ideas and values and styles (whatever that means exactly). But other translations are done by scholars who are specifically trying to access very different world views with their work. (I can say that among Western languages, English is a fantastic research language for Classical Chinese texts.) Other translations are done by religious organizations that are trying to bring a specific worldview into English; Buddhist texts, for instance, are exceptionally well translated in English because of Buddhists following injunctions to spread the scriptures. There are probably more types than this. I suggest that these different kinds of translation efforts are qualitatively different enough that they would have to be considered to know how significant cultural exchange through translation is.
I’m very curious how China fits into this. I think Mandarin is probably the second biggest publication language, and looking very quickly online they seem to have a translation rate of around 12% of books published, though I’m not at all sure about these numbers. My guess is that they also have a pretty low rate per publication of translation into other languages., at least into English. I study the history of Chinese philosophy, so this is something I’m curious about.
The idea of ideas having an Anglo-American origin is also tricky since I would imagine English also acts as a hub such that ideas get translated into English and then from English to other languages.
Probably there are significant limits on how thoroughly or definitively any of these questions can be answered, but this is what your article and comment make me think about.
Thanks. All this helps me (us) think about this more. And to give a full answer to all your questions one would need to research and write a book... Quickly, working backwards:
Mandarin (or China, depending on whether you look at languages or countries) seems to have this very lopsided character, lots of books published, lots translated into mandarin, and (especially proportionally speaking) vanishingly few books translated from mandarin. It definitely shows that the various metrics are not at all necessarily functions of each other: publishing more does not make you being translated more, and translating more does not result in more outgoing translations, either. Politics is a massive factor here, and the translation patterns also seem to fit in well with what one knows about the massive expansion of Chinese higher education.
The channels of translation are also a fascinating area, and you obviously know much more about Classical Chinese than I ever hope to. This kind of very crude big picture account cannot possibly discern these differences--very little contemporary literature translated from mandarin, or from China, especially compared to how enormous that literary universe is does not contradict the fact that Classical Chinese is well translated. English-language academic publishing is globally dominant, maybe even more than in the realm of fiction--and the translations you mention are probably scholarly works, so they fall under this category. This is true across all classical languages, I think, not just Chinese: scholarly editions translations are published in English, and--by now less often--in German or French. Everyone in the world uses those. There is a complete Homer, maybe Plato in many other languages, Horace, Vergil, most of Ovid, maybe even a complete Aristotle, but then much of the rest is not available in good translation. Whereas in English, there is the Loeb Classical Library--editions plus translations of pretty much everything that survives (and is studied at all).
But then again, the entire Loeb Classical Library is probably not bigger than the number of foreign books translated into English any given year. The written world is expanding so quickly.
The small number of books translated into English is a relative figure, a percentage. But in absolute terms, it is not that small--and it is a long tradition, with deep backlist of titles you can get from the library. The percentage issue becomes a problem vis-a-vis contemporary output. There is an explosion of contemporary writing the levels of translation don't keep up with. The historical canon, or even the historical corpus, is comparatively small, and is becoming proportionally smaller as we speak.
Similar things might apply to religious institutions and organizations.
About English: mass literacy is one factor, population size another, and political power a third. English was comparable to French and German, and probably bigger than Spanish, Italian, definitely than Russian, by maybe 1900 (I am just guessing here, no figures). It really started to take off after WW1, and became super dominant after WW2. The cold war was part of it. A complicated story I am only trying to understand.
So many dimensions.
I would love to know more about the Chinese case. For example about the transformation that seems to have taken place after the 1980s. Translation history is a vast subject, and we are only beginning to teach ourselves about it.
Great to have such great interlocutors. Thanks.
Thanks for another fascinating reply. I wish I knew more about modern publishing. China does seem like it could be interesting case study for how the established English language industry interacted with the rapidly emerging Chinese language publishing industry. This discussion arouses my curiosity about how that happened.
Yu Hua, the novelist, has a nice essay that has been translated about how massive a shift it was to go from his childhood reading official communist books (the only ones available) solely for the footnote biographies to having books everywhere, including folks trying to sell him counterfeits of his own books on the street. Whatever happened sure was big.
I’ll look forward to reading more of your publications.
Thank you--I will try to find that essay, but if you remember where you saw it in translation, please let me know. And yes, that would be a fascinating thing to even begin to look into. We know so little.
It’s in his collection China in Ten Words. I don’t remember which essay it was though without my copy in front of me. Maybe it’s the one on Lu Xun.
Absolutely fantastic post on the global flow of translations. So informative, so thought provoking. I have so many--not so much questions as just general areas I'd like to know more about.
Lots of curiosity about the relation between patterns of translations and patterns of population (predictably). Japanese appears to have a fairly large internal literary market relative to the population of speakers (at least as compared to, e.g., Spanish) and a low proportion of translations; is there a case to be made for literary protectionism for languages that are, where translation is concerned, already peripheral?
Also curious about the relationship between being a literary exporter and a cultural exporter, e.g., South Korea has obviously become a major cultural exporter... but are its literary exports picking up as a result? Korean is the only language course at Duke to have increased enrollments in the last decade or so, so one might expect so. I understand that Turkish TV is also a major export with lots of links to the Arab world.
And about the relationship between number of translations / number volumes total: are bestsellers big enough to shift the patterns, or not?