The Translation Databases Have Been Updated

If you want to download all new, up to date version of the Translation Databases, you can do it here.

These include all books that I’ve logged on through this morning, although, as always, if there’s anything missing, just email me. I have a day or two of Edelweiss catalogs to search through before the 2015 database approaches validity, and I’m sure there are a handful of 2014 books that slipped through my cracks.

As a reminder, these are works of fiction and poetry that have never appeared in English before. No new Goethe translations, no Anna Karenina. No reprint of a Polish classic that was available back in the early 1980s. Just books that English-readers would otherwise have no access to in any translation.

There’s always a lot to unpack numbers-wise in these updates, but I just want to look at two things—overall number of translations published and the top ten publishers.

Starting with overall figures, you can see the steady increase in the number of translations published and distributed in the U.S.:

2012: 460 total (387 fiction, 73 poetry)
2013: 541 total (448 fiction, 93 poetry)
2014: 587 total (494 fiction, 93 poetry)

That’s not bad at all . . . When I started this in 2008 there were only 360 books to be identified. (Is this the parenthetical where I start talking about 63% increases so that John O’Brien can shit all over my optimism and claim that my numbers are just percentages—percentages THAT DON’T BRING DALKEY ARCHIVE MORE GOVERNMENTAL SUBSIDIES?)

In terms of the top 10 publishers, there are four that have been in the top 10 each of the past three years: Dalkey Archive, AmazonCrossing, Europa Editions, and FSG.

Five have been in the top ten at least two of those years: Open Letter, Other Press, New Directions, Seagull Books, and Archipelago.

Seven of the nine presses listed above are independent/nonprofits, one is corporate (FSG), and one is Amazon.

Speaking of Amazon, in 2014 they knocked Dalkey Archive to second and took over as the top publisher of translations, bringing out 44 titles compared to Dalkey’s 30.

All of which is interesting and can be picked apart in various ways, but in the end, I hope you scan through these lists and find a few books to check out!