Translation Database – Three Percent /College/translation/threepercent a resource for international literature at the URochester Fri, 04 Aug 2023 11:23:18 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9.4 The Visual Success of Women in Translation Month [Translation Database] /College/translation/threepercent/2023/08/04/the-visual-success-of-women-in-translation-month-translation-database/ /College/translation/threepercent/2023/08/04/the-visual-success-of-women-in-translation-month-translation-database/#respond Fri, 04 Aug 2023 11:00:21 +0000 http://www.rochester.edu/College/translation/threepercent/?p=442602 is EVERYWHERE.

Whenever I open Twitter (or X?), my feed is wall-to-wall WIT Month. Tweets with pictures of books to read for WIT Month, links to articles about WIT Month and various sub-genre lists of books to read during WIT Month, general celebratory tweets in praise of Meytal Radzinski for founding WIT Month, announcements of WIT Month related events (seemingly a few a day), publisher promotions for their WIT titles, and tweets talking about how all the tweeter can talk about is WIT Month. The sheer volume of tweets and retweets and responses to earlier WIT Month is— it’s, it’s just ·É¾±±ô»å.Ìý

It’s at the point that being on Twitter doesn’t even make me mad! WIT Month has, at least temporarily, washed away so much of the rage and insanity from my feed. It’s wonderful. If this is what the “death of Twitter” looks like, I’m on board.

Anyway, you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who wouldn’t agree that, anecdotally at least, Women in Translation Month has been a smashing success. It’s got such great online buzz. Presses pay attention and help promote it in a variety of ways. Bookstores and readers join in. The was inspired by WIT Month. Across all those metrics—word-of-mouth, raising awareness, getting attention for the cause and the books—WIT Month has been an unquestionable hit.

And, at least according to the data in the , this isn’t just anecdotal: there’s been a huge shift in the makeup of literature in translation since 2014.

Before sitting down to run the numbers and write this post, my sense was that there are more and more books by women coming out in translation all the time. Just within Open Letter, we’re publishing more women in translation than ever, what with three coming over the course of a year, the all-female Translator Triptychs from and , etc.

And, thanks to the , this is really easy to prove.

I started by looking at the number of works of fiction or poetry written by women published between 2008 and 2023, but on it’s own, these numbers are of limited interest. It is fun to see the huge jump between the number of translated works of fiction by women published in 2008 (only 63) and in 2016 (182 works by women), but between 2014 and 2021  the numbers are pretty stable.

What’s really illuminating though—and kind of mind-blowing—is the clear and steady increase in the percentage of books written by women. In 2008, when we first started collecting data, 76% of all published works of fiction in translation were written by men. Only 22% by women. That’s a ³¾²¹²õ²õ¾±±¹±ðÌýgap. Three out of every four translations were written by a man. Accessibility has a huge influence on what gets onto the shelves in bookstores, what gets reviews, which books dominate the general discourse, etc.

Looking at this chart, there’s no question that WIT Month has had a giant impact. In 2013, the year before WIT Month launched, only 26% of the works of translated fiction published were written by women. In 2022, that number was 47%.

A decade ago, it seemed inconceivable that there would be an almost equal percentage of books written by men and women coming out in translation in a given year. And yet . . . I’m truly astonished. To be able to see the impact of a program this clearly is incredible.

Kudos to Meytal and to everyone who has been supporting WITMonth over the past decade. It’s literally changed the shape of our reading culture for the better.

*

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be adding as many books as possible to the and doing some general clean up. So if you have a book that’s missing from the database and needs to be added, please fill out . Same if you see a listing with a typo or other error. Thanks for your help!

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The Translation Database Has Moved! /College/translation/threepercent/2019/01/31/the-translation-database-has-moved/ /College/translation/threepercent/2019/01/31/the-translation-database-has-moved/#respond Thu, 31 Jan 2019 16:00:38 +0000 http://www.rochester.edu/College/translation/threepercent/?p=413602 As you can read about in this , the is no longer being updated on this site.

I hope to upload spreadsheets compiling all the data from time to time, but for now, is where you can get the most up-to-date data about which titles are being published in translation for the first time ever in the U.S.  (That link has a full explanation of the various criteria.)

Also, you can now add/correct information in the by entering the information in . It will not be corrected/added immediately, but I do work my way through all of these requests on a weekly basis.

Additionally, we’ve expanded our scope to include non-fiction and children’s books, so feel free to add any and all of those as well.

Finally, if you want to see the in action, be sure to read my weekly articles, which frequently combine data from the with commentary on one (or more) recently translated titles.

But again: If you’re researching translations in the U.S., y0u need to go .

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The Biggest Update to the Translation Databases Ever (And Some More Women in Translation Data) /College/translation/threepercent/2017/08/16/the-biggest-update-to-the-translation-databases-ever-and-some-more-women-in-translation-data/ /College/translation/threepercent/2017/08/16/the-biggest-update-to-the-translation-databases-ever-and-some-more-women-in-translation-data/#comments Wed, 16 Aug 2017 14:00:00 +0000 http://www.wdev.rochester.edu/College/translation/threepercent-dev/2017/08/16/the-biggest-update-to-the-translation-databases-ever-and-some-more-women-in-translation-data/ OK, I’m supposed to be packing for my summer vacation right now, so this is going to be a lot shorter than it otherwise would be. But! I just updated the Translation Databases! Not just the spreadsheets for 2016 and 2017, but every spreadsheet I’ve ever run. There’s up to date info on 2008-2018 AND new spreadsheet with the complete listing of every work of fiction and poetry that I have logged into the database.1

I had to change the format a bit on this page, so nothing is as pretty as it could be, but have fun downloading all of this and pouring over the data. And letting me know what’s missing.

While I updated everything, I created a series of charts tracking all sorts of data about the most popular languages, countries, publishers, etc., etc. I would post some of that here, but I’m actually going to save it for a series of articles that will likely appear elsewhere and will include a lot more analysis.

But, since it’s Women in Translation Month, and since I posted some info about this already, I thought I’d share two charts.

First up is a chart with the percentage of books in translation written by men, women, or both (“both” indicating mixed gender writing teams and/or anthologies) over the period of 2008-2018. And yes, this is for the writer in the original language. The author who created the primary work.

Never really gets that close, unfortunately. In 2016 there’s a 30.01% difference between books originally written by men (63.82%) and those written by women (33.81%), but of the ten years tracked, there’s a 40%+ gap between these percentages for five of them. (The worst is 2008 in which 74.11% of the translations published were originally written by men and only 23.43% were originally written by women.)

In terms of raw numbers—and including all the updates sent in after my last post—there were 1,417 books written by women over this ten year period versus 3,351 by men. In terms of overall percentages, 28.97% were by women, 68.50% by men. This could be much closer to equal.

Then there’s the question of translators. In this case, women fare much much better.

See how those two lines converge in 2017? That’s because, as of this moment, women have translated 248 of the books published this year, and men have translated 249. So close! And a nice little bit of news for Women in Translation Month. Yes, there are still more men from around the world having their works translated into English, but more and more translation jobs are going to women.

There’s a lot more to say, but it’s late on Tuesday and I still need to pack . . . See you in a week or so!

1 Poetry. Fiction. First time ever published in translation. No reprints. No new editions. Available in America. 2008 onwards. Cool? Cool.

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Complete Translation Databases /College/translation/threepercent/2017/08/15/complete-translation-databases/ /College/translation/threepercent/2017/08/15/complete-translation-databases/#comments Tue, 15 Aug 2017 22:09:15 +0000 http://www.wdev.rochester.edu/College/translation/threepercent-dev/2017/08/15/complete-translation-databases/ To download the complete Translation Database, click here.

To download the 2018 Translation Database, click here.

To download the 2017 Translation Database, click here.

To download the 2016 Translation Database, click here.

To download the 2015 Translation Database, click here.

To download the 2014 Translation Database, click here.

To download the 2013 Translation Database, click here.

To download the 2012 Translation Database, click here.

To download the 2011 Translation Database, click here.

To download the 2010 Translation Database, click here.

To download the 2009 Translation Database, click here.

To download the 2008 Translation Database, click here.

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Women in Translation Month 2017 /College/translation/threepercent/2017/08/09/women-in-translation-month-2017/ /College/translation/threepercent/2017/08/09/women-in-translation-month-2017/#respond Wed, 09 Aug 2017 15:07:42 +0000 http://www.wdev.rochester.edu/College/translation/threepercent-dev/2017/08/09/women-in-translation-month-2017/ I just finished entering in all the data for the Translation Database (super huge mega astonishing absolute extreme update to come), I thought I’d run a few quick reports for Women in Translation Month.

First off, the big one: For the data I’ve collected between 2008-20181 only 28.7% of the translations in the database were written by women. That’s 1,394 titles out of a grand total of 4,849. That’s not great . . .

What are those 1,394 books? Click here and you can get the full list of all of them! Right now this Excel spreadsheet is sorted by Language, then Author Name, then Title, but you can do it by Year, Publisher, whatever you want. Go crazy with it! Publish excerpts for the countries/languages you’re most interested in. Use it to find out about books and authors you weren’t previously aware of. There’s a lot of data to mine there.

I could run a million of these reports, but I have some other work to do, so for now, I’ll leave off with two others: one organized by Country, one by Language and one by Publisher.

These results are a bit surprising, I think. First off, here’s a list of the ten countries that have produced the most total titles written by women.2

France 155
Germany 145
Sweden 84
Italy 64
Spain 64
Japan 62
Argentina 49
Russia 43
South Korea 39
Quebec 38

(Yes, I list Quebec as it’s own country, which probably is something that will bring down the Royal Mounties. But in my defense, this does capture every book translated into English by Canadian authors. So if you’re anti-Quebec, just replace that with “Canada”—it’s the same number.)

It’s interesting that there are so many books in translation by women from South Korea, yet there’s really only a couple of female Korean authors who are getting much play in the media or on Literary Twitter. (LitTwit? Kill me now.)

Obviously, certain languages are at a disadvantage when you look at their authors by country of origin, so here’s the top ten by language.

French 236
Spanish 186
German 185
Swedish 88
Italian 67
Japanese 60
Russian 46
Arabic 44
Korean 39
Norwegian 37

With all those Quebecois authors in tow, French really pulls away here. But Arabic coming in 8th? That was unexpected. Not terribly surprised about Swedish and Norwegian being on here, although keep an eye on Danish. That seems to be the hot language for women writers these days . . .

And, here are the top ten publishers.

AmazonCrossing 194
Dalkey Archive 58
Europa Editions 47
Seagull Books 37
Other Press 28
New Directions 26
Open Letter 24
Atria 19
Feminist Press 17
Penguin 17

Pretty similar to the list of the top ten overall publishers of translations, but still, pretty interesting. And wow, Amazon, wow.

Anyway, enjoy all the spreadsheets, all the data. And feel free to share any of this or to break it down in whatever way you want. I know there are a million other reports, and if there are one or two that a lot of people ask for, I’ll try and get to them later this week.

1 We only track fiction and poetry (all genres, including young adult, but not kids books, not graphic novels, not drama, not nonfiction) that is published in translation for the first time ever during this period. No retranslations of unexpurgated texts. No reissues. Just new voices that had never before been available to English readers.

2 This is different from the countries with the most female authors who have been translated. That would be really interesting as well, especially since some Scandinavian countries are probably getting a boost by having female authors who write crime series.

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Updated 2014, 2015, & 2016 Translation Databases /College/translation/threepercent/2016/02/01/updated-2014-2015-2016-translation-databases/ Mon, 01 Feb 2016 19:10:46 +0000 http://www.wdev.rochester.edu/College/translation/threepercent-dev/2016/02/01/updated-2014-2015-2016-translation-databases/ I just uploaded new versions of 2014, 2015, and 2016 translation databases to our master translation database part of the website.

There are two big updates worth noting here, before getting into some of the breakdowns: 1) I added over 150 titles to the 2016 database, so this is starting to look a little bit more robust than last time, and 2) each of these lists the gender for the author and translator, along with reports breaking these down by percentage by fiction and poetry. (More on that below.)

First off, here are the general comparisons that seem most worthy to note1:

Overall Number of Titles

         Fiction       Poetry     Total

2014    502          98           600
2015    478          91           569
2016    209          17           226

We can ignore 2016 for now—there are zero books currently listed for October, November, and December—but it’s worth pointing out that the total number of fiction and poetry translations published for the first time in 2015 dropped by 5% from the previous year. That’s not a huge number (31 titles), but it is the first time since 2010 that the figure has dropped. (2009 we logged in 360 titles, 2010 only 346. Since then we’ve gone up to 378, 459, 544, then 600. Percentage-wise, that’s pretty solid.)

In terms of the most-translated languages, French, German, and Spanish take up the top three spots in each of these reports. For 2014 and 2015, the order is French, German, Spanish, but so far in 2016, it’s French, Spanish, German.

Between 2014 and 2015, Chinese jumped from seventh overall to fifth, Russian fell from fifth to ninth, and Danish replaced Japanese, but other than that everything was pretty much the same as it has been for a few years. Italian came in fourth, with Arabic, Swedish, and Portuguese being the other languages that appeared in the top ten along with the aforementioned Russian, Danish, Chinese, and Japanese.

Publisher-wise, Amazon is still the main story. They did 46 books in 2014, 75 in 2015, and have announced 31 titles so far in 2016. (Just a note: Dalkey is above them so far this year, with 34 titles listed, but that includes titles they’ve announced through September 2016. By contrast, the Amazon titles are all from the first half of the year. In fact, 28 of the 31 are from January through April. It looks like they’re going to end up over 70 again.)

*

I suspect the data about the gender of authors and translators will be the most discussed part of these reports, so let me explain a bit first.

Over the past summer, a couple of my interns went through every record we have from 2008-2016 trying to figure out if the author and translator identified as “male” or “female.” Theoretically, we could/should expand this out into other gender categories, but this seemed like a relatively good starting point. We used author/translator bio pronouns to determine how to categorize all of the artists, with a few minor exceptions. If we absolutely couldn’t figure out if the artist was male or female we generally logged him/her as “Both” for the time being. (I can always change those later.) In a few instances, I don’t know who the translator is—those records are left blank. Also, if the book is an anthology containing pieces by men and women, or if a book has a translation team with men and women, it’s marked as “Both.”

If anyone is identified incorrectly on these spreadsheets, just let me know.

Here’s the general data, as I have it:

2014: 30.68% of fiction was by women (154 books, compared to 343 by men, and 5 by both), 36.73% of poetry was by women (36 to 59 to 3), meaning female authors made up 31.67% of the total (190 to 402 to 8).

2015: 29.50% of fiction was by women (141 to 325 to 12), 34.07% of poetry (31 to 54 to 6), and 30.23% overall (172 to 379 to 18).

2016: 33.01% of fiction was by women (69 to 134 to 6), 35.29% of poetry (6 to 11 to 0), and 33.19% overall (75 to 145 to 6).

In short, the percentage seems to be hovering around 31% total, which isn’t great.

Female translators fare slightly better, but only slightly.

In 2014, women translated 39.50% of the fiction and poetry published in English for the first time (237 books compared to 317 translated by men, 46 by both).

In 2015 that percentage went up to 43.74% (248 titles compared to 277 by men, 42 by both).

And so far 2016 is right in the middle: 40.89% (92 titles to 121 to 12).

This can be broken down by language, by publisher, by any number of things, and will be, once I find some more time. For now, download all of these, play around, send me corrections, and find some books that sound interesting to you.

1 As always, here is my set of disclaimers: I only count works of fiction and poetry that have never before appeared in English translations. No new translations, no reissues, no manga, no creative nonfiction. Also, I do this by myself, so all mistakes and omissions are mine. Some might be justified, others might be related to how many hours exist in a week and how many jobs am I trying to do again? If you know of something that’s missing, let me know and I’ll either add it or explain why I’m not sure it counts. Also, send me your 2016 books, poetry people. These are always the hardest to find, but to have only 17 listed at this point in time? That’s just sad.

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Translation Database Updates: AmazonCrossing Is the Story /College/translation/threepercent/2015/12/07/translation-database-updates-amazoncrossing-is-the-story/ /College/translation/threepercent/2015/12/07/translation-database-updates-amazoncrossing-is-the-story/#comments Mon, 07 Dec 2015 00:32:04 +0000 http://www.wdev.rochester.edu/College/translation/threepercent-dev/2015/12/07/translation-database-updates-amazoncrossing-is-the-story/ The other day, I posted about the Translation Databases, pointing out that the 2014, 2015, and 2016 databases have all be substantially updated.

That post was a bit bleak, talking about a 15% reduction in the number of works of fiction and poetry published in 2015 when compared to 2014.1

Since that went live, a lot of things happened. As always, I encourage people (publishers, translators, readers, booksellers, cultural organizations) to let me know if there are any missing titles. That happens regularly, although not all of the titles submitted actually turn out to be eligible. On Friday, the entire narrative changed.

In that initial post, I wrote about how the top ten publishers of translations—especially AmazonCrossing and Dalkey Archive—didn’t do as many books in 2015 as 2014, which explains a huge chunk of the decline. On Friday, a PR person for Amazon told me that I was missing a ton of AmazonCrossing titles. Eventually she sent me a list of all the books they published in 2015.2

Now, a few days later, the situation has changed dramatically. Let’s start with the basics:

According to the most current version of the database, in 2014, 600 works of fiction and poetry were published for the first time—502 works of fiction, 98 of poetry.

Right now, I’ve identified 549 titles that came out in 2015—468 works of fiction, 81 of poetry. That’s a drop off of 8.5%, which isn’t as bad at the previously reported 15%, but is still something.

Looking closer at 2014: 202 publishers brought out at least one new work of fiction or poetry in translation, and these titles were translated from 49 different languages and authors hailing from 73 different countries.

In 2015, only 151 presses brought out an eligible translation, with the books published being translated from 48 different languages by authors from 79 countries.

Over the next few weeks, I’m going to investigate the 51 presses who fell off the list, and hopefully I’ll uncover a couple dozen more titles. For the sake of this post, I’m going to put that aside, since there’s no clear indication that I’m missing a(nother) huge chunk of books.

Let’s look closer at the publishers though, since that’s where things get interesting (in my opinion). Here are the top 10 publishers in 2014:

AmazonCrossing 46
Dalkey Archive 30
Seagull Books 21
Europa Editions 19
Gallic Books 16
Other Press 15
New Directions 13
K A Nitz 11
Atria 10
FSG 10

Those presses account for 191 titles, or 32% of all the counted titles.

Here’s 2015:

AmazonCrossing 75
Dalkey Archive 25
New Directions 20
Seagull Books 16
Atria 13
Gallic Books 13
Le French 11
Minotaur 10
Open Letter 10
Archipelago 9

These presses account for 202 titles, or 37% of the grand total.

But what obviously stands out is Amazon, sitting up there with 75 titles—three times more than the next press. Three times! They make up almost 14% of all the translations included on their own. That’s incredible.

So, why is there a decrease between these two years? From a cursory glance at these reports (I’ll do more later, when I’m not exhausted, half-sick, and watching football), it seems like fewer presses did translations in 2015, and the ones that usually do the most fell off just a bit. I’m not sure why . . . Might be because the market isn’t supporting a lot of the smaller presses that have been doing two or three translations a year, so they cut back to one or zero. I know Dalkey switched distributors and locations this year, which is obviously going to throw things off for a bit. Kerri Nitz told me that he had to slow down on his translation and publishing project this year because of a move. It happens. And hopefully this is just a fluctuation, not a trend.

But if there’s one thing that we could do to change this, it’s to buy more works of international literature and to get people who don’t usually read international lit to but one or two books. If all of these books sold an additional 250 copies on average, things would most certainly change. This is especially true of small, independent, nonprofit presses. If we sold 250 more copies of each of our books, I might actually be happy and less neurotic.

Also, without making too big of a deal out of it, I want to point out that it takes a lot of work to keep up this database. It’s not part of my official job, and it’s not something that we as an organization are obliged to maintain and share. But we do. For free. I spend most of my day working on this because I think it’s important for the literary community. And although I’m always tempted to lock it down and charge for access ($10 a year? $100 for institutions?), I can’t bring myself to do it.

Open Letter is a nonprofit, which means a few things to me. Most importantly, I think a nonprofit should do things to benefit culture as a whole. Yes, we need to sell books and reach as many readers as possible—it’s not like we can just do whatever we want and live off of donations. But I personally believe nonprofit presses should be doing some things that aren’t financially motivated. It could be offering internships to high school and college students. Giving away books to correctional facilities. Hosting free public workshops or bringing authors to communities that aren’t New York and don’t often have access to professional writers. Or, maybe, providing a database of international literature and trying to support the field as a whole. Nonprofits should be good literary citizens.

That said, we obviously need donations to survive. We don’t get nearly the amount that we need (no one ever does, I know), but for something like this, it would be great if literary patrons would consider to ensure that we can continue to publish and promote this database. It’s something I want to continue to do, for everyone, but a bit of financial support would go a long way.

1 What I track in the database are all the works of fiction and poetry published in translation for the first time ever. Just to make sure there’s no confusion, I’m going to expand this footnote to explain that is and isn’t included. I don’t currently track non-fiction, graphic novels, manga, or children’s books. Just fiction and poetry. New translations (even if they’ve never been published before) of books previous available in an English translation are not included. If a collected poems comes out and more than half of the poems are available in other, previously published volumes, I don’t include it. All books in the database have ISBNs and/or are registered in WorldCat. They are available for sale in the U.S. through normal distribution methods (bookstores can order them), although the presses don’t have to be based here. The key: Fiction and poetry ONLY, and books that have never been available in any prior English translation.

This isn’t a reflection of ALL translations being published, since there are a significant number of new translations and reissues coming out every year. And a significant number of nonfiction books. (Probably.) Take it for what it is. If we got any money whatsoever for doing this, we might be able to expand it. But the situation being what it is—note that I just spend four hours on a Sunday working on it—I’m doing the best I can.

2 I don’t want my musings/jokes to overrun the story above, so I’ll put them here. First off, the initial email from Amazon simply stated that my reporting was wrong. They were publishing 76 titles this year. (This wasn’t quite accurate—she missed a few titles and included a book of essays and one by an Australian originally written in English.) Without actually listing the titles [insert joke about Amazon not being great with sharing actual data], it was kind of hard to figure out what was missing, what had gone wrong.

I use two sources for info on what AmazonCrossing is publishing: a monthly email from their team with links to review copies, and this Maybe someone reading this will really “get” the Crossing site, but I don’t. It’s totally fine, but figuring out what books to add to the database requires clicking on those “new release” options on the left every 30 or 90 days, and checking all the titles there against what’s already been logged. There’s no quarterly catalog, no easy way to do this. And when they’re doing so many books, it’s quite a bit of work.

What’s weird to me, what I want to make fun of, is that I’ve sent updates of the database to over 200 publishers (including Amazon) on multiple occasions this year. That’s one of the ways I find out what’s missing. As recent as two weeks ago, Amazon said nothing about titles missing from the official list, although they did respond with submissions for the Best Translated Book Award. Which is fine, except that I feel like people in charge of PR should be doing PR for their books, such as by telling a website focused on international literature about the books they’re publishing. That would be nice. Because I can tell you, having gone through all of the titles they’ve published, I’ve seen almost no attention whatsoever for these books. I’ve been a long-time supporter of this particular aspect of Amazon, praising the fact that they’re doing the books other presses ignore (romance in translation, for example) and giving jobs to translators.

But it would be so much better if people were discussing these books! Sure, there aren’t many outlets reviewing translations at all, and I’m sure there’s a widespread bias against books coming out from Amazon, but I also don’t think they’re doing all that they can to get the word out within the existing community of people interested in international literature. (Although I want to point out that they do a great job working with ALTA and advertising at the annual conference.) Maybe they don’t need to, instead relying on direct marketing to readers. But I feel like more could be done, and it’s sort of unfair to some of these books. (Like Bae Suah’s Nowhere to Be Found.)

Basically, what I really want is a PDF catalog describing all of their titles. It would make my life easier and I am selfish.

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2015 Translation Database Update /College/translation/threepercent/2015/10/21/2015-translation-database-update/ /College/translation/threepercent/2015/10/21/2015-translation-database-update/#respond Wed, 21 Oct 2015 16:06:43 +0000 http://www.wdev.rochester.edu/College/translation/threepercent-dev/2015/10/21/2015-translation-database-update/ I just updated the 2015 Translation Database.. If you want to compare this to past years, you can find info on all translations from 2008-2015 here.

This is one of the free services Three Percent provides as a nonprofit organization, and which I work on in my spare time because I care about the field of literature. I know no one owes us anything for this, but if you’d like to see things like this—or like the Best Translated Book Awards, or the World Cup of Literature, or our summer internships—please consider You can donate any amount via that link, or, if you’d prefer, you can support our by purchasing a ticket and gifting it to someone local who otherwise wouldn’t be able to do.

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Women in Translation, Part I: Fourteen Countries /College/translation/threepercent/2015/10/05/women-in-translation-part-i-fourteen-countries/ Mon, 05 Oct 2015 17:38:54 +0000 http://www.wdev.rochester.edu/College/translation/threepercent-dev/2015/10/05/women-in-translation-part-i-fourteen-countries/ Over the past few months, with the help of two fantastic interns, I’ve updated the Translation Database to include the sex of every author and translator in there.1 It was a brutal task, hunting down information about all of these people, scanning bios for gendered pronouns and then entering all of this into the database. But, now that it’s done, I can start running reports and provide specifics about the gender imbalance with regard to literature in translation.

It’ll be a few more weeks before I have everything sorted and organized, but when I do, I’ll post a huge, comprehensive report looking at everything from how many books by women have been translated from Spanish over the past seven years, to which publishers have the most balanced lists.

Because these reports are fascinating (well, fascinating and depressing), I’m planning on posting mini-updates here as I run them.

Right now, I’ve only completed two main reports: One that breaks down male vs. female authors (and male vs. female translators) by year and genre (fiction vs. poetry), and one that breaks down male and female authors by country of origin.

The results of the first one are pretty bleak. Between 2008 and 2014 there were 2,471 fiction translations published in the U.S. for the first time ever. Of those, 1,775 were written by men, compared to 657 by women, and 39 by men & women. In terms of percentages, female authors make up 26.6% of all the fiction translations published over the past seven years.

Poetry isn’t much better. Of the 571 books included in the database, 384, or 67.3% are by male authors. Only 169, or 29.6% of the poetry collections published during this period were by women.

I suspected going into this that there would be significantly more male authors published in translation than women, but I figured it would be more like a 60-40 split, not 71-27. That’s brutal.

Breaking it down by country is equally depressing. Female authors made up 50% or more of the books from only 14 of the 110 countries represented in the database. Here’s the complete list:

Armenia: 1 male author, 1 female author (50%)
Belarus: 2 male authors, 3 female authors (60%)
Costa Rica: 1 male author, 1 female author (50%)
Croatia: 4 male authors, 4 female authors (50%)
Ecuador: 1 male author, 1 female author (50%)
Finland: 10 male authors, 18 female authors (62%)
Latvia: 0 male authors, 1 female author (100%)
Mauritius: 0 male authors, 3 female authors (100%)
Myanmar: 0 male authors, 1 female author (100%)
Niger: 0 male authors, 1 female author (100%)
Rwanda: 1 male author, 1 female author (50%)
Saudi Arabia: 2 male authors, 3 female authors (60%)
Slovakia: 0 male authors, 1 female author (100%)
Wales: 0 male authors, 1 female author(100%)

That’s it. Here’s the breakdown from a handful of other notable countries:

Argentina: 60 male authors, 30 female authors (33%)
China: 76 male authors, 21 female authors (20%)
France: 253 male authors, 96 female authors (27%)
Germany: 146 male authors, 78 female authors (35%)
Italy: 134 male authors, 41 female authors (23%)
Japan: 118 male authors, 47 female authors (28%)
Russia: 97 male authors, 32 female authors (23%)
Spain: 114 male authors, 36 female authors (24%)
Sweden: 79 male authors, 47 female authors (36%)

At some point, I’m going to group these by region (Middle East, Southern Cone) and see how that breaks down. At first glance, it seems like the Scandinavian countries (Iceland, Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden) might have the best balance. Adding those five countries together, we get 201 male authors and 113 female authors, or 36% women. Still not great, but considering that female authors only make up 27% of the grand total, it’s significant.

More to come as I enter more and more data into the master spreadsheet . . .

1 To clarify a bit, if a book has more than one author or translator of differing genders, I coded them as “both.” Same goes for the two or three people we couldn’t identify, like When the percentages above don’t add up to 100%, it’s because there’s one or more authors coded as “both.”

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Updated 2014 and 2015 Translation Databases /College/translation/threepercent/2015/06/12/updated-2014-and-2015-translation-databases/ /College/translation/threepercent/2015/06/12/updated-2014-and-2015-translation-databases/#respond Fri, 12 Jun 2015 18:00:00 +0000 http://www.wdev.rochester.edu/College/translation/threepercent-dev/2015/06/12/updated-2014-and-2015-translation-databases/ OK, so there are still titles to uncover for the 2015 Translation Database, but this update gives us a much clearer picture of how many translations of fiction and poetry will be coming out in the U.S. this year.

As a reminder, in 2014 (and this should be pretty close to 99% accurate), there were 591 translations published for the first time ever: 494 works of fiction and 97 poetry collections.

So far, I’ve identified 358 translations coming out in 2015: 307 works of fiction, 51 of poetry. (Once I find the time to spend a few days scouring catalogs on Edelweiss and poetry listings on SPD, this number will surely increase.)

As in most every year, French is the most translated language so far in 2015 (80 titles to date, far outpacing second place Spanish, which only has 50), and the top ten publishers of translations at this moment are: New Directions (20), Dalkey Archive (19), AmazonCrossing (15), Gallic Books (13), Seagull Books (11), Open Letter (10), Deep Vellum (9), Minotaur (9), Atria (8), and Syracuse University Press (8).

Again, I have some research to do—especially in relation to AmazonCrossing and Dalkey Archive—so don’t take these as final numbers by any means. It is fun to check in with these databases though and see what books are coming out, and from where . . .

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One other thing worth noting: The next time I run these updates (probably in August or September), I should be able to break them down by male vs. female—both for the authors and translators. That should result in some really interesting figures . . .

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