John O’Brien writes:

Altogether, how many foreign works are reaching American readers in translation?

A now-famous National Endowment for the Arts study in 1999 showed that only 3% of the fiction and poetry published in the United States that year were translations. The actual number was 197 books, which stands in sharp contrast to the practice in other countries, where that percentage can be as high as 50%.

In catalogs from Knopf, Norton, Viking, Harcourt, and Farrar, Straus & Giroux, for the past two years there were altogether 31 translations of contemporary foreign fiction and poetry.

Americans are particularly disinterested in the literature from foreign countries, for much the same reasons they are not very interested in their own literature (in a country of 250 million people, a literary novel that sells 15,000 copies is a walloping success).

Between 2000 and 2005 only 18  works of Dutch fiction were published in the United States. By contrast, during the same period, American publishers published 52 French, 39 Italian, 36 German, and 29 Russian volumes of fiction in translation. These figures do not include old classics or popular fiction, only serious modern fiction has been counted.

In addition to those much-translated literatures, the list show that Cuba, the Czech Republic, Norway, Poland, and Spain each had a dozen volumes published, but no other country produced more than 8.



What are some of the main problems form the view-point of an American publisher? Money, of course.