Translation into English – and instant translation

By ADRIAN TAHOURDIN

In their newly published report, Publishing translated literature in the United Kingdom and Ireland 1990–2012, Alexandra Büchler and Giulia Trentacosti, of the Mercator Institute for Media, Languages and Culture at Aberystwyth University, write “The absence of data on published translations and the low literary translation output has always set the United Kingdom and Ireland aside from the rest of Europe”. To explore this further, they have “embarked on the task of collecting and analysing translation data” and has come up with the following:

The oft-quoted figure of 3 per cent, that being the proportion of translated books to English-language books (over the period 1990–2012), is accurate.

This compares with 12 per cent in Germany, 15 per cent in France, 19 per cent in Italy and 33 per cent in Poland.

“Some languages, both European and non-European, are very poorly represented, notably Eastern European languages”.

Literary translations are slightly higher, at 4 to 5 per cent. That would be novels.

In Germany, English was the “leading source language at 63% with French in second place at a mere 10.2% share”.  (In France, English scores 61 per cent, with Japanese second at 13 per cent.)

The report points out that there are six available English translations of Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. “Following Three Percent’s logic, should only one of these be listed and the remaining ones ignored? Does not each of these translations in fact represent a ‘new voice’?” I would say it does.

The report does not draw any significant conclusions. My views, for what they’re worth, are that the UK and Ireland will always score quite low when it comes to translated literary work for the simple reason that we have the whole anglophone world at our disposal. Having said that, we could certainly translate more, particularly from the languages the report says are neglected; above all, we could perhaps translate more quickly. As I pointed out in the TLS earlier this year, Michel Houellebecq’s new novel Soumission was available in a German translation in the same month as it was published in France (it's scheduled to appear in English this September). That meant that German readers who had read about the fuss it was causing in France could immediately go out and buy a German translation and make up their own minds. And Kazuo Ishiguro’s new novel The Buried Giant appeared in a French translation (as Le Géant enfoui) one day after British publication. Indeed, Ishiguro is in France at the moment, promoting his new and newly translated novel.