booklab

The basic pattern is familiar: Most translations of books have English originals (ca. 60 percent on average) , while hardly any translations travel back into English (guesses are at 2 to 3 percent).

But what happens to smaller languages, e.g. from highly fragmented, yet culturally rich regions such as Central Europe? And how do medium sized languages, like French or German?

This is what the Diversity Report 2008 is all about, a very first approach to mapping the flows of translation all across Europe, which is now ready for download.

There are a lot of surprises in the 44 page report which is packed with over 30 diagrams full of details:

The strongest translating country is not Germany anymore, but France;

Translations between Central European countries are only half of what it was before 1989, disregarding all funding efforts;

Translations from German into many languages decrease, undermining Germany’s role as a gateway to many languages and cultures;

There are a few winners in Central Europe (and elsewhere) though, languages with an upward trend for translations, notably Swedish, Polish, or Czech.

Frankly, compiling the report and mapping cultural diversity was a hell of a lot of work, and my brain is still confused from all the numbers and charts we produced, but it was clearly worth the effort.

And I shall report details here, after our presentation on Friday at the “On Translation” conference at Buch Wien 08.

A brief visit to the Netherlands parachuted me into an interesting university seminar at Leiden - a lovely city with an outstanding and historically long tradition both in book printing and in gardening and an impressive brand new public library.

After spending a few hours in the botanical garden, where they had planted those very first tulip pulps in the 17th which led to one of the first really severe stock market break downs of modern history, I sat down in an auditorium and listened to three gentlemen from the Dutch book trade, as they rolled out their views on digital change ahead.

Interestingly enough, they seemed to be pretty confident about what was going to happen.

One (who runs a kind of consortium distribution agency for books owned by all the publishers collectively?!) said that they needed only to adapt their fulfillment to the new kinds of electronic books.

The second, a librarian, had visions about how libraries would become agents in turning those digital documents into Print on Demand (POD) books - yet did not seem to be very much aware of the complexities in dealing with all the copyrights and commercial interests  involved.

The third, who was with an e-Book facilitator, saw a good business in helping probably independent publishers in going digital.

All three were kind of sure that e-books will be just a new kind of paperback or audio book subsidiary right of  books as we know them.

As these gentlemen spoke, 4 different kinds of e-Book readers were passed to us in the auditorium, the Amazon Kindle (which kind of froze, and it was impossible to me or anyone else to get it back to life), a Sony Reader (which was clearly my favorite in terms of look & feel), and two others.

Surprisingly enough for such a specialized set of speakers and listeners, money, business models or rights issues - aside of direct piracy, which everybody disliked, of course - were hardly addressed.

I did my best in expressing my suspicion that the paths into the digital future of the book will be less linear than expected by the present practitioners.

Still, I feel an urge to repeat, once again, this old joke:

Remember this debate about how we need to imagine God? Someone from the audience stands up and says: “First of all, She is black!”

I suppose that e-Books will mean real change, and not just more of the same.