{"id":266246,"date":"2008-11-21T17:07:15","date_gmt":"2008-11-21T17:07:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2008\/11\/21\/publishing-models-translations-and-the-financial-collapse-part-5\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T17:27:35","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T17:27:35","slug":"publishing-models-translations-and-the-financial-collapse-part-5","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2008\/11\/21\/publishing-models-translations-and-the-financial-collapse-part-5\/","title":{"rendered":"Publishing Models, Translations, and the Financial Collapse (Part 5)"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is the fifth part of a presentation I gave to the German Book Office directors last week. Earlier sections of the speech can be found here.<\/a> And we’ll probably be posting bits and pieces of this for the next week or so.<\/em><\/p>\n

Obviously there\u2019s more that goes into the resistance of commercial publishers to translations\u2014such as the fact that most editors are monolingual, that without investing a lot of time in international literature it\u2019s hard to know which titles and authors are the most important, that there aren\u2019t as many agents for international works as for American and British writers, that only select editors attend the Frankfurt book fair (it\u2019s all about selling, not buying)\u2014but it all adds up to a situation in which America is \u201ctoo isolated, too insular,\u201d where we \u201cdon\u2019t translate enough and don\u2019t really participate in the big dialogue of literature,\u201d which is how Horace Engdahl, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, recently categorized it.<\/p>\n

Prejudices, financial losses, and bum legs aside, a number of translations are published in the U.S. every year. In January, I started keeping track of all original translations of fiction and poetry published or released in America this year. (In part because nobody else was. Bowker\u2014the company that keeps track of all statistics about American publishing eliminated \u201ctranslation\u201d as a category years ago.) I didn\u2019t count children\u2019s books, or graphic novels, or retranslations of classics, or paperback versions of previously published titles. Instead, I focused on works of adult fiction and poetry that had never before been published in English. <\/p>\n

According to my records,<\/a> all of 340 translations were published in the past year. Of those translations, 269 are works of fiction, 71 of poetry. More relevant to this presentation, the six big houses\u2014Hachette, Macmillan, Penguin, HarperCollins, Random House, and Simon & Schuster\u2014and all their various subsidiaries, published a total of 69 works in translation, or 20% of the total. Most of these 69 books are from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (10), Penguin (9), FSG<\/span> (9), Knopf (8), and HarperCollins (6), five of the one hundred and thirty presses and imprints that published a translation this year.<\/p>\n

In the same way that poetry has fallen to the shoulders of the independent press, approx. 80% of all works of literary translation are now being published by independent, nonprofit, and university presses, which generally don\u2019t operate on the \u201cbig advance-big return\u201d model described above.<\/p>\n

\n<\/a>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is the fifth part of a presentation I gave to the German Book Office directors last week. Earlier sections of the speech can be found here. And we’ll probably be posting bits and pieces of this for the next week or so. Obviously there\u2019s more that goes into the resistance of commercial publishers to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[1836,7276,16586],"class_list":["post-266246","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-cwp","tag-future-of-publishing","tag-gbo-speech"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266246","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=266246"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266246\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":355816,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266246\/revisions\/355816"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=266246"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=266246"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=266246"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}