Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

The position of English as source and target for the vast bulk of translation done in the world to date is brought out by ranking the most popular source languages for translations into any selection of languages you care to choose. This table shows the main source languages for translations of books into thirteen widely spoken languages since UNESCO first started keeping records:

Top four source languages

What’s clear is that English, French, and German dominate translation worldwide. Russian has a perhaps surprising role in fourth place, but the eight others that appear on this ranking—Spanish and Italian three times each; Sanskrit twice; Japanese, Finnish, Bengali, Arabic, and Malayalam only once each; and Chinese not at all—are peripheral to the global business of translating books.

The raw numbers of translated books on which this ranking is based produces an even more startling picture of the pyramidal structure of global translation today. Of the nearly 1 million translations used to compile the ranking, more than 650,000 are translations from English, and a further 10 percent of the total number consists of translations into English. English is the medium as source or target of 75.12 percent of all translation acts.

What these figures also show is that around 42 percent of all the translations recorded in the UNESCO database between the thirteen languages listed above have taken place in closed circuit between just three of them—English, French, and German. This is not an ineluctable consequence of the fact that of the million books we are dealing with, more than 47 percent were published in one of those three languages, too. Culture is not the prerogative of any part or place in the world, but book culture—and, within it, the culture of translation—is heavily concentrated in Britain, the United States, France, and Germany.

As a result, at any truly representative gathering of translators from across the globe, between 70 and 90 percent of delegates must be L1 speakers of a language other than English. To put it another way: if you would really like your children to earn their living as translators, you’ll give them a much better chance if you don’t raise them in Britain or America. This also explains why translation is much less easy to see and understand when you are based in the English-speaking world. You don’t meet many translators in the normal course of life in London, Sydney, or Cork—but they’re all over the place in Geneva and Berlin.

The flow of translations has always had a hierarchical structure: the present situation reproduces a pattern that can be observed many times in the historical past. Translation typically takes place not between languages felt by their speakers to be on an equal footing but between those that in some respect have a vertical relationship between them. Laws, commands, instructions, and treaties are translated DOWN—from Sumerian, Greek, and Latin in ancient times; from German in the Hapsburg Empire; from Ottoman Turkish in the long period of Ottoman sway in the Mediterranean basin—into vernaculars spoken by people who need to grasp what the rules and agreements that affect them are. Novels, plays, philosophical and mathematical treatises, and religious texts may accompany them, but not always. Out of these kinds of situations the world over have grown ideas among the speakers of culturally dominant tongues that their language is inherently superior and the only true vehicle of thought. In the Muslim world, for example, there was little doubt in past centuries about which language was top:

The perfect language is the language of the Arabs and the perfection of eloquence is the speech of the Arabs, all others being deficient. The Arabic language among languages is like the human form among beasts. Just as humanity emerged as the final form among animals, so is the Arabic language the final perfection of human language and of the art of writing, after which there is no more.[129]

Seventeenth-century French grammarians made much the same assertion about French, and similar expressions of confidence in the superiority of Greek, Persian, Latin, Chinese, and who knows how many others among the world’s temporarily dominant tongues could easily be lined up.