{"id":261176,"date":"2008-03-31T14:27:47","date_gmt":"2008-03-31T14:27:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2008\/03\/31\/translations-in-the-new-york-times\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T14:10:13","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T14:10:13","slug":"translations-in-the-new-york-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2008\/03\/31\/translations-in-the-new-york-times\/","title":{"rendered":"Translations in the New York Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

We mentioned this<\/a> a couple weeks back, but this morning, the Literary Saloon<\/a> has a more factual follow-up to Douglas Kibbee\u2019s claim that translations are on the rise, as evidenced by the increase in coverage for translations in the New York Times Book Review.<\/i><\/p>\n

Michael Orthofer\u2014who both questioned the veracity of this statement and the idea that a review of a translation a week was a success\u2014compiled some stats on the last three issues:<\/p>\n

Of the 62 books reviewed in all a mere two \u2014 Ogawa Yoko\u2019s The Diving Pool<\/i> and Michael Kr\u00fcger\u2019s The Executor<\/i> \u2014 were originally written in a foreign language (and they only received the \u2018books-in-brief\u2019-treatment).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I have a complicated relationship to all of this, in part because I feel that Kibbee\u2019s kind of right\u2014things are getting better for translations, he just chose an odd way of \u201cproving\u201d it\u2014and that it\u2019s not necessarily the mandate\/responsibility of the NYTBR<\/i> to cover a certain number of literary translations. True, it\u2019s unfortunate that so few foreign voices make their way into the Book Review, and as a publisher who is always scrapping for any review coverage we can get, I wish the Times<\/i> reviewed only literary translations, but I don\u2019t feel like the Times<\/i> is unilaterally hostile towards all books in translations.<\/p>\n

(I\u2019m sure many bloggers will disagree with me about this, but I really believe that what gets reviewed is tied up in a more complicated dynamic including who the publishers are, what\u2019s hot, how publishers publicize, etc., etc. It\u2019s just not as simple as translation vs. English . . . It may fall more into the realm of large publisher\u2014with all the clout and organizational resources associated with that\u2014versus small\u2014and often disorganized or too busy to focus\u2014and since large publishers have the means to really promote their books, and since so few are works in translation, these statistics turn out the way they do. I\u2019d be interested in seeing what the percentages are for coverage of translated books from commercial presses versus translated books from indie presses. I suspect that a healthy percentage of books reviewed in the NYTBR<\/i> from independent presses are literature in translation\u2014but that the number of reviews of books from independent, or university, presses is rather modest. In shorthand, it\u2019s complicated . . . )<\/p>\n

One thing that came up at the Translation Conference panel was the relative lack of translator-reviewers. At a panel that took place a few weeks ago, representatives from the New York Times<\/i> and The New Republic<\/i> commented on how it can be difficult to find a good reviewer familiar enough with the context and tradition surrounding a particular work of international literature to be capable of writing a really thoughtful, interesting review.<\/p>\n

That may be a bit of a cop-out, but it is absolutely true that there are far more American writers reviewing these days than there are translators . . . Not sure in the end if this would make a difference, but if there were a couple dozen very active translator-reviewers out there pitching books, capable of writing about a work from Brazil without relying solely on the English version and flap-copy bio of the author, maybe there would be an overall increase in the amount of general coverage of translations. . . .<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We mentioned this a couple weeks back, but this morning, the Literary Saloon has a more factual follow-up to Douglas Kibbee\u2019s claim that translations are on the rise, as evidenced by the increase in coverage for translations in the New York Times Book Review. Michael Orthofer\u2014who both questioned the veracity of this statement and the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67456],"tags":[11086,806,726,1836,7736,1646],"class_list":["post-261176","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-review","tag-book-reviews","tag-business-of-books","tag-complete-review","tag-cwp","tag-michael-orthofer","tag-review"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/261176","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=261176"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/261176\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":331486,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/261176\/revisions\/331486"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=261176"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=261176"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=261176"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}