| Saturday, April 28, 2007 12:06AM | | | | The State of Translations | Posted By: Luke Epplin
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It’s common knowledge that translations make up an abysmally low percentage of the literary marketplace—around three percent of all books published in the United States are translations. But consider this: according to the Chinese writer Ma Jian, translations didn’t ever appear in China until the turn of the twentieth century. Before then, in his words, “we thought that foreign languages were languages of the birds, beautiful but unintelligible languages. Translations made the languages of the birds comprehensive to humans.” But with the introduction of translations in China came new problems. A movement arose to eliminate classical Chinese and replace it with a more modern version, one that includes or incorporates words from a variety of foreign languages. The movement was largely successful, and now, according to Jian, very few young people in China are familiar with classical Chinese. Translations now pop up in China at a rapid rate, even with the relatively strict censorship laws there. A new novel can be translated and on the marketplace within two weeks in the most extreme of cases, which is absolutely mind-blowing for someone who works in the publishing industry, an industry which moves at a glacial pace.
The American writer Siri Hustvedt followed up by telling an anecdote that sums up why translations aren’t popular in the United States. Several months ago, she watched a news story about how public schools in South Carolina no longer make foreign languages a mandatory part of the high school curriculum. They interviewed a local man about this, and he remarked, “I don’t see what the big deal is. If English was good enough for Jesus Christ, then it’s good enough for me.” Everyone cringed in unison. Such ignorance, she noted, is partially responsible for the miniscule number of translations available here, but then so are publishers, who feed this ignorance by not introducing and championing more foreign writers.
But just how responsible are they for this curious phenomenon? I’m an editor at a large publishing house, but I work at a very small division within that house that focuses on literary fiction and translations. Over the past several months, we’ve published only international fiction, from writers ranging from Colombia to Germany to Malaysia. We put a great deal of effort into promotion and awareness, and fought hard within the publishing house to bring attention to these books. The results have been mixed: critically, the works were very well received, but financially, we fared modestly. Of course, we’re proud to have published these works and will continue to champion our authors, but I’m still left with these questions: Are there so few translations because publishers overlook them, don’t promote or support them, and/or classify them too hastily as “money-losers”? Has this led to modest readerships for translations? Or is it that the audience for both literary fiction and translations is shrinking precipitously, and given the financial situation of modern publishing (most houses owned by bottom-line corporations, and other houses struggling to stay afloat), most houses simply can’t take many chances on translations if they don’t believe that an audience will be there? In other words, how much fault lies with the publishers’ ignorance and lack of faith, and how much lies with the dwindling audience for such works?
I don’t know the answer, but I continue to believe that there’s just as big an audience for translations as there is for literary fiction in English. Why else would I seek out translations for publication if I didn’t believe in them? Solving the translation problem most likely will entail dissolving publishers’ knee-jerk response to translations: that they don’t make money. This is, by and large, a myth. After all, a very smart literary agent once showed me a study that demonstrated that the percentage of books that succeed in English is more or less equal to the percentage of translations that succeed. The difference is that because there are so many more books published in English, there are more successes, which gives the false impression that they fare better than translations.
So there’s hope yet; it just might require a change in attitude.
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