booklab

(…)

Knapp neun Prozent aller Neuerscheinungen in deutschen Verlagen sind Übersetzungen. Davon entfallen etwa zwei Drittel auf die Belletristik. Zwei von drei Übersetzungen stammen von englischen Originalen ab, weitere rund zwölf Prozent aus dem Französischen. Das bedeutet, dass Übersetzungen aus allen anderen Sprachen insgesamt gerade einmal ein Fünftel aller Übersetzungen ausmachen.

Außerdem nimmt die Zahl der Übersetzungen ins Deutsche im langjährigen Durchschnitt kontinuierlich ab. Weitgehend unbemerkt hat Deutschland auch seinen Ruf als wichtigstes Übersetzungsland in jüngster Zeit an Frankreich abgeben müssen. Diese und ähnliche Daten deuten auf ein vertracktes Problem hin.

Stellt man sich die kulturelle Kommunikation zwischen unterschiedlichen Ländern und Sprachräumen als überaus komplexes Nervensystem vor, dann gehören die Übersetzungen von Büchern klarerweise zu den Hauptsträngen der Kommunikation. Komplexe Ideen und komplizierte Geschichten reisen meist nur über Sprachgrenzen hinweg, wenn sie auch als Übersetzungen angeboten werden. (…)

Die ganze Geschichte hier.

After a pause of a few months - and lots of strategizing, research and development and just a huge load of regular work, this blog is back in operation. So expect to find posts and a few improvements here on a regular basis again.

The quick link of today points to the “50 Fiction Authors Whose Work Had the Greatest Impact on European Reading Markets in 2009“.

While we are fully aware of the leading trio - with Stieg Larsson, Stephenie Meyer and Dan Brown -, the report and analysis carries quite a few surprises, too.

Only 21 of the 50 strongest authors write in English! Among the top 10, we find 3 Swedish crime authors. And we can deduct a number of insights on European reading markets - and how the reader’s curiosity seems to be much more substantial than conventional media reporting has it!

The yearly top revenue based ranking of Chinese writers by Danwei provides, just as in previous editions, some highly interesting (and entertaining) insights in how the Chinese fans and readers are ticking. Don’t only go for the top few names, but read the by-lines, and occasionally check back grounds for the names listed - and you will discover some absolutely valuable and relevant results. The ranking is to be found here.

Books allow ideas and stories to travel, and translations are the vehicle of choice. Oddly enough for such a fundamental mechanism at the core of culture and cultural diversity, we have little precise knowledge, and certainly no data based analysis about the patterns formed by those flows, and even less about the forces driving or hindering the exchange.

After having tried to map the flows of translation across Europe at the most general level in the “Diversity Report 2008”, the present analysis has the ambition to break down those general observations to the level of individual (fiction) authors and their work, and track how they move across languages, or how they do not. Metaphorically speaking, we try to get from a general physical map of the European landscape of translations to a road map.

Findings include:

1. Books translated from English represent on average about one third of the bestselling authors and titles across the continents, with only Sweden being significant exception;
2. The UK bestseller market is by far the most averse to translations.
3. As one consequence, national preferences show a much wider variety of – particularly domestic – authors and books, representing on average another solid third of the top segment, to the effect that countries’ reading preferences seem to be much more diverse, than ‘homogeneous’ across Europe;
4. Only a small group of authors writing in ‘other’ languages than English or the respective local majority vernacular succeed with translations of their work in a larger number of markets and countries, with some like Larsson and Zafón out-competing their Anglo-Saxon peers;
5. The very top segment in bestseller lists is a very narrow segment indeed, propelling just 2 or 3 authors in their own category for each country, with the singularity of this high peak marking a significant distinction between markets, and remarkably, it is the UK and Sweden, or two markets with a particularly high percentage of domestic authors on top, where the entire curve of the bestselling authors is considerably flatter than in countries with lesser impact of domestic authors;
6. At least for the past few years, a recognizable number of European, non-English writing bestseller authors evolved and found a broad mainstream readership across markets and languages, yet exclusively authors from “Western” (or “old”) Europe, forming an exclusive club which is almost impossible to access for authors e.g. from CEE.This West-East “one way street” described above is the only pattern where West & East forms meaningful categories, just as “big” and “small” languages and markets of origin seem to play a far smaller role than often assumed;
7. While in EUWest, no systematic distinction between a (‘high’) literary elite and eventual access to the top bestselling segment across Europe through translations seems to prevail, this is clearly the case for authors from CEE who made their way to the European literary ‘elite’, but as niche authors, not as authors found access to the European mainstream book readership.
8. The diversity in fiction bestsellers in terms of treated topics, background of the authors, tonalities and styles is huge, and many of the most successful authors are initially ‘made by readers’, and not planned, contradicting, in the initial career of authors and their successful books, the popular notion of bestsellers being engineered and homogenous.

These findings come with a few provocative insights.

• The market for rights and licenses which is currently the core driver for translations, does not take in the full spectrum and diversity of what is on offer from authors across Europe, nor what seems to be reader’s preferences. Instead, only a limited set of authors from a restricted set of backgrounds are given the full access to the European reading markets, despite the fact that the recent careers of European non-English writing authors provide strong indications that an appreciative readership for such a wide diversity may exist. The funding policies for translations lack the information and the tools for a realistic assessment of their efficiency.

• The data compiled and, at least partly, analyzed for this report suggest that a more differentiated and realistic picture of the cultural dimensions of the European book and reading markets can actually be developed;
• The ambivalent role of English as a bottleneck and as a driving force:
  All general translation data show the evidence of how little is translated into English, if compared to other target languages; and yet more of the ‘elite’ authors are available in English than what is generally assumed. English therefore plays a significant role as a transfer language (together with French and German), a factor of growing importance as the readiness of reading literature in certain foreign languages (most often this means: in English) seems to spread. In many markets, English reading of books written not only in English, but in any language seems to expand, and new digital technologies will drive this development forcefully in the near future.
• For policy makers, this brings up the critical question of either continuing to focus on translations between the many languages, or to also emphasize lead programs of translations into English.
• The potential for innovation by digital:
  As digital distribution currently picks up momentum with electronic reading devices and most new titles being rapidly available not only in print, but also in digital formats, there is a strong likeliness that books in translation as well as in their original editions (or in one transfer language, notably in English) will spread much more easily than in the past; this aspect has the potential to develop into a “game changing” mechanism for all kinds of niche reading, hence for literary translations, within a relatively short period of time.

The full “Diversity Report 2009” is ready for download at www.wischenbart.com/translation .

Following up on the very successful and fruitful debates at last year’s „On Translation“ conference at the Vienna book fair Buch Wien, we prepare for a next move with the “On Translation” conference and “Diversity Report” 2009 and want to encourage your participation and involvement.

Presentations and debates will focus on reliable information sources and professional tools for analyzing and better understanding translation markets, and on the relevance of publishing to cultural diversity.
A new “Author’s and Publisher’s Exchange” will link between the general debate and the requirements of publishing professionals.

The goal is to have, with the conference, a professional platform for organizations and for publishing professionals interested in translation and cultural diversity, while the report is meant to provide data and insight as a starting point for a well informed debate.

When? November 13, 2009
Where? Buch Wien 09 Messe Wien
Full details, registration and preliminary program: here

More about Buch Wien 09: here

As for the “Diversity Report 2009” please find a detailed preview here.

Please circulate the information about both the conference and the upcoming report and/or link to www.wischenbart.com/translation from your website, blog or twitter!

See you in Wien in November

Tracking significant milestones of how Chinese literature and publishing interacts with the West, we can refer to reports in the Hollywood reporter and The Bookseller that Jiang Rong’s novel “Wolf Totem” is going to be turned into a major movie by French director Jean Jacques Annaud.

As The Bookseller reports,

The film will be made in China, with backing from the Beijing Forbidden City Movie Co, according to the Hollywood Reporter. Annaud plans to plans to breed wolves and train them from birth to take part in the story of a Chinese student who goes to Inner Mongolia during the Cultural Revolution in the 1970s and captures a wolf cub to raise.

The book which had been high up in China’s bestseller charts for years, was the first major acquisition of Penguin’s newly established Beijing bureau chief Jo Lusby ca. 3 years ago, and was then successfully presented in translations across Europe and the USA.

In only one day, I came across two just hilarious examples of how books and minds, across time and space, mock our funny lives as book worms.

I currently tour German publishers with a group of US editors, courtesy to the German Book Office of the Frankfurt Book Fair. This morning, after a nice meeting at Hanser Verlag in Munich, we were shown the villa of Thomas Mann.

thomas-mann_muenchen

Well, to be entirely honest, this is not exactly what the picture to the left shows. The house is in fact a life size replica of the building that the German writer had constructed from the royalties of his thundering success of “Die Buddenbrocks”, a novel about a German mercantile family, and where he lived until he went into exile from Hitler and the Nazi, to Switzerland, and then to California.

After 1945, we have been told, the house was acquired by a local drugstore owner, partly torn down, then adapted, refurbished, later, by 2000, owned by two brother Internet start up millionaires until they went bancrupt, then entirely torn down, and now reconstructed from scratch by an investment banker who made his fortune most recently by brokering, on behalf of Goldmann & Sachs, the merger of Daimler and Chrysler (another big failure of financial adventurism). Here we were, puzzled and in awe at the villa of Thomas Mann, yet now, allegedly with an indoor swimming pool in the basement.

Today, no income from literary work could buy such a house in the first place, of course.

Later this afternoon, over a beer, I read the newspaper, Süddeutsche Zeitung, and found the report (unfortunately not online) of Franziska Augstein, who was also accompanying a group of book people across Germany, in her case Muslim librarians.

They were shown, for instance, the destroyed Baroque jewel of what used to be the Anna Amalia library in Goethe’s Weimar, burned down a few years ago and now reconstructed in an amazing effort, painstakingly - to the puzzlement of a librarian from the Gaza strip where libraries also burned down, under Israeli bombardment, but no such effort is even conceivable, as even the acquisition of every single book must now be allowed by the occupying military.

One visiting librarian was intrigued by the pre-eminent role, here in Germany, of a certain Martin Luther, mentioned by the tour guide over and over again. The visitor from Saudi Arabia was familiar, of course, with Martin Luther King - but learns only here about the name patron of the gunned down US civil rights activist, the German reformer and translator of the Bible into local vernacula in the 16th century.

He likes the story, and yet that same guest is appalled in the Baroque environment by those mural paintings of naked bodies, even of children (meaning: angels, in Baroque fashion) - only to be told by a fellow Muslim traveler that this must be some mural against child labor.

Of course it is much too easy to marvel at such misunderstandings while omitting our own misreadings of “cultural discoveries” when on unfamiliar terrain.

In Afghanistan, a Kabul librarian explains that the Taliban did not even need to destruct all the libraries. The largest library of the capital, with some 300.000 books, or the size of an average faculty library in Germany, was not even cataloged, so finding a given title was almost impossible anyway.

Which puts an entirely new light on the importance of one more library visited by the group, called the Middle East Virtual Library, or Menalib in Halle.

Being busy with my group and with keeping up with my work, I couldn’t even check out properly that initiative aiming at digitizing and easing access to books and other documents from across the Arab world and the Middle East. But at a first glance, the initiative looks impressive indeed.

With the reconstructed Thomas Mann villa and the burned down and re-invented Anna Amalia library, and the many misconceptions and sheer misunderstandings in the most simple exchanges when traveling and seeing new things, I feel pretty humble - and, frankly, I like the idea that there is more and more of a back up available, even an imperfect one, yet accessible from almost everywhere, and by anone, of those books that we have and want to consult and read, and which may get lost otherwise by just some stupid accident.

This week’s NYTimes Sunday Book Review focuses on new books from Chinese authors, including:
‘The Vagrants‘, by YIYUN LI
Reviewed by PICO IYER
‘China Witness: Voices From a Silent Generation’
By XINRAN
Reviewed by JOSHUA HAMMER
‘Brothers‘
By YU HUA
Reviewed by JESS ROW (with a portrait of the writer in the Sunday Magazine.

According to our charts, he was probably the most stunning author across Europe in 2008, and now his book makes it to the movies: “Män som hatar kvinnor“. You don’t recognize the smash hit?

This weekend, Stieg Larsson’s “The Girl with the Dragon Tatoo”, volume one of his Millennium series, is opening - in Sweden and Denmark.

This is all about the really counter-intuitive story of a feverish Swedish investigative journalist who, to make some money for his retirement, writes a series of 3 crime novels, but does so in a way that normally guarantees it that the book is not a success. The author dies only a week after bringing the manuscript to his publisher who, of course, recognizes the jewel he got and publishes the book. The rest is probably the most iconic legend about writing and publishing in these days.

Introducing “The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize” Long list, Boyd Tonkin, literary editor of The Independent likens Larsson together with Chilean Roberto Bolano’s “2666” (currently #14 in the UK charts) as the perfect examples for novels which, under conventional wisdom, should never ever make it into any bestseller charts, as both books are “very long, complicated, sometimes eccentric and driven by a quixotic idealism”, have a dead author and are translations- and yet.

The really amazing thing about the Larsson movie however is that after such a unique performance, it has not been turned into some Hollywood blockbuster with a cast of international stars. Instead it is a Danish production, directed by Berlin festival winner of 2006, Niels Arden Oplev.

Livres Hebdo reports that the movie may open the French movie festival in Cannes in May 2009, and that so far, volume 2 and 3 of the Millennium series are set to hit only TV and DVD screens, not the cinema. So far, TV rights for France have not been sold, but Canal+ seems to be closest.

Which just teaches a good lesson about culture and arts being much more complex as popular myths of “global homogenization” have it.

It was Geety Dharmaraja of New Dehli, a beaming lady with an inescapable sense of mission and the founder of a stunning Indian translation project called Katha who made several of the most remarkable points at this week’s Salzburg Global Seminar on translation.

“Perhaps we are about to go full cycle”, she told the startled: “We started with oral traditions, moved on to written literature, and now get into oral story telling again!” And, wrapping it all up, she would proclaim upfront: “Gutenberg must not have to live!” Meaning something like who can be sure that the printed book on paper is once and for all the solution to our reading (and story telling) requirements.

Salzburg Schloss Leopoldskron

We were sitting in the prestigious Schloss Leopoldskron (where theater director Max Reinhard had an apartment during the fesitval in the 1920s), with lots of snow outside, and ever more falling from a grayish sky, some 60 or so translators from 4 continents and experts in literature and translation.

Presentations and discussions were going in various directions: About the status of translating literature (and the poor working conditions for many translators), about models to foster translations, and yes, about funding and how to better organize funding. There was a wide spread consensus that much translation of main stream fiction can hardly be done and only find a publisher, certainly in the English speaking world, if the cost of translation is somehow dunded by a grant. So translation is very much a not for profit activity - with Harry Potter and the like being an exception.

I had the pleasure to give a presentation on our “Diversity Report 2008“, maping languages that, aside from English of course, are strong in translations, and others that struggle on the margins.

Translators, as we all know, are a community of highly focused folks, busy with their craft. But in all our conversations, sometimes more openly, and sometimes only between the lines, the digital change ahead was the big question in the room: Can we still, for a while at least, do things as if nothing happened? And for how long? Or is change already here? And it was funny to realize how often someone acknoweledged that new things and new habits had already become part of the daily habits.