Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

But what of the rest? All or part of the Jewish and Christian scriptures exist in nearly twenty-five hundred languages. Some of these also have translations of legal and administrative texts, and a few possess news or gossip magazines and a small quantity of popular fiction. But what’s obvious from these numbers is that more than half the world’s languages probably receive no translations at all, and all but fifty or so export almost nothing, either. Print translation happens only in special places. That’s not to minimize its importance but to point to the peculiarly asymmetric relations that have always obtained among the different forms of speech on this planet.

UNESCO, the cultural arm of the United Nations Organization, has attempted since its founding to keep track of the global flow of translations through the Index Translationum, which is now available as a searchable database on the Web. It can be used as a rough measure of the huge imbalances in translation in the world today.

Chinese is spoken by about a quarter of the world’s population, and in a well-balanced and reciprocating global society you would expect it to be the receiver of about a quarter of the translations done in the world. The truth is nothing like that at all.

Taking seven world languages of different kinds for the ten years from 2000 to 2009, Chinese is the receiving language of just over 5 percent of all the translations done in all directions among these tongues—barely more than Swedish, whose speakers number less than 1 percent of the speakers of Chinese. But the picture in the reverse direction is even worse. Only 863 books were translated from Chinese into Swedish, Hindi, Arabic, French, German, and English combined, whereas more than twice that number of books written in Swedish were published in Chinese, Hindi, Arabic, French, German, and English combined.

Books translated between seven languages, 2000–2009 inclusive

Nearly 80 percent of all translations done in all directions between these seven languages over a decade—104,000 out of 133,000—are translations from English. Conversely, barely more than 8 percent of all translations done in the same set are translations into English—whereas French and German between them are the receiving languages of 78 percent of all translations.

The asymmetry is striking and, in some senses, quite alarming. Granted, published books do not provide the only channel of intercultural communication; in addition, the data stored by UNESCO may not be complete, and its search engine may have its own quirks. But the overall picture—which is confirmed by what any traveler can see in any airport bookstore in the world today—must be broadly true. Translations from English are all over the place; translations into English are as rare as hen’s teeth.

It is neither accurate nor even interesting to pin the responsibility for our lopsided translation world on the Almighty Dollar alone.[127] Translation flows measured in this way also fail to give a particularly convincing map of military power in our own or recent centuries. The initial spread of British English around the globe was certainly the fruit of colonial expansion—but the huge scope and increasing pace of its dominance followed the dismantling of empire that began in 1947. The imperial hypothesis fails to explain why French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch, the languages of equally far-flung and densely populated empires between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries, are nowhere near the top of today’s global translation tree. For every work in Spanish translated into English in the first decade of the twenty-first century, fifteen were translated from English into Spanish. Yet there are almost as many native speakers of Spanish (around 350 million) as of English (400 million) on the planet today.