Introduction

02

Introduction

The evidence gathered in the preparation of this report shows that the European literature market is in fact not as multilingual as one would hope. The literature markets in Europe are dominated by domestic literature, on the one hand, and translated Anglo-American books, on the other. This leaves little space for books translated from other European languages.

ANNUAL TRANSLATED BOOKS OF THE WHOLE OUTPUT OF EUROPEAN PUBLISHERS

ENGLISH TRANSLATION IN EUROPEAN COUNTRIES Market figure in Europe

As already mentioned in the introduction, it is not easy to obtain comparable data for the book sector across Europe. However, recent studies and figures collected by the OMC group suggest that translated books represent less than 25 % of the whole annual output of European publishers (between 15 % and 25 % of publications in western and Nordic countries, but higher in central and eastern European countries, which tend to be more open). In all countries from which figures were collected in the group, English is the most common language for translation, representing around 54 % of total translations, and even widely spoken languages lag far behind English in the number of translated books. On average, French makes up less than 10 % of the total number of books translated, followed by German, Italian, Spanish, Swedish, Norwegian, Russian, and, lastly, the remaining Nordic languages – Danish and Finnish. The other languages that appear on top 10 lists mostly appear in countries of the same region where the language is spoken and/or where cultural similarities make them more appealing for the target language publishers and readers. Other cases include nonEuropean languages such as Japanese, for instance in France, where Manga is very strong. For further figures covering each country, see Annex VI, ‘Book and Translation Market Overview’.