Colonial Legacies in Translation: Thinking with Data
By Tina Mitchel and Drake Avila
When we read and think in English and from the United States, which global perspectives are we getting? More specifically, how do colonial legacies inform this balance? One way of thinking about this question is through the patterns of translation of foreign books into English. Focusing on Spanish and exploring French, we take up the particular question of how the number of English translations of books in these languages is distributed between metropole and former colonies. In examining Publisher’s Weekly data, which contains information on books published in the US since 2008, we find that a meaningful number of books translated into English are from both former Spanish and French colonies, but that the majority of books from Spanish and French are texts from Spain and France respectively, despite the large populations and rich Spanish and French language literatures of many of the former colonies.
The Publisher’s Weekly dataset claims to include “All works of fiction, poetry, children’s books, and nonfiction translated into English and published in the U.S. after January 2008.” According to Publisher’s Weekly, books are entered into the dataset “based on publishers’ catalogs, review copies received, and Publishers Weekly reviews.” Each entry in the dataset includes the title and ISBN of the text, as well as information about it like the author, translator, and genre. For our analyses, we focused on the “country” identified as the source of the text and the “language” of the original.
Any claim to include ‘all’ of a certain category is suspect and reminds us to be skeptical of the reliability of the dataset. Indeed, there appear to be mistakes in the Publisher’s Weekly dataset, or at least categorizations of the national origin of books that do not match their most logical representation. For example, the origin country for the well-known Chinese text Dark Forest is listed as “Chile.” Finally, the Publisher’s Weekly data contains “published” books, so it does not include translated songs, zines, manifestos, circulated manuscripts, speeches, and many other forms of translated international communication. Thus the data doesn’t perfectly map onto our question about whose perspectives are being translated; texts of other types are being translated and published in the US, and books are being translated and read without meeting Publisher’s Weekly’s threshold for official ‘publication.’ Despite these limitations, we find the data helpful in determining which patterns to interrogate further.
First, we isolated the top 20 countries of origin for translated books and found that there was a significant disparity between European countries and other countries (13 versus 7).
In the above analysis, Spain is the fourth-most translated country. However, when you sort by language, Spanish moves to the second-highest spot.
This leads us to suspect that a significant number of Spanish books from former Spanish colonies are being translated. In examining the breakdown of Spanish books by country, we find that, indeed, Argentina, Mexico, Chile, and Cuba each account for 50 or more books; Spanish books from former colonies are definitely being translated. However, when we view the countries individually, instead of using the reductive lens of collective former colonies versus metropole, we find that the disparity is large. Indeed, 325 books were translated from Spanish to English from Spain (population 47 million), while 240 books were translated from Argentina (population 45 million).
What’s happening here? Looking more closely, there are 28 Children’s books translated from Spain and only 10 translated from Argentina. It is difficult to think about what is missing on the Argentina side, but we might ask for example why the picture book Grandpa Monty’s Muddles (Spain) is valued enough to be translated and published. Is there a high value placed here on Spain’s mundane, everyday cultural productions?
French is not as easy to compare as Spanish, since many former French colonies use French as only one of many languages. Thus, there are other languages being translated into English from these colonies.
However, we include French here because the gap between books translated from France and the other 19 countries is staggering. In the dataset, 1169 of books translated from French to English are from France while the number of books translated from Canada (second largest contributor) is only 175). From number 2 to number 3 (Belgium) there are only 36 books translated from French. The disparity here is even larger than in the Spanish case, but, indeed, the complexity of French colonial histories make it more difficult to draw conclusions about the disparity in American readership of materials from former French colonies.
Thus we find that both Spanish and French are being translated to English from a variety of countries, but there is a disparity in translation between the metropole and former colonies significant enough to be worthy of further inquiry. To further understand the French data, we would suggest that future work explore the number of books written in French versus other languages in former French colonies, and incorporate translation data for other languages in those countries. More broadly, future work might take up questions of how particular colonial legacies (including the relation of the United States to those histories) might shape US translation resources, interests, and practices.
Sources:
Publisher’s Weekly Translation Database.
https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/corp/translation-database-FAQ.html
The World Bank Population Data.
