The Linguist is a languages magazine for professional linguists, translators, interpreters, language professionals, language teachers, trainers, students and academics with articles on translation, interpreting, business, government, technology
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10 The Linguist Vol/55 No/4 2016 www.ciol.org.uk FICTION IN TRANSLATION holiday fare. Or you may, as I attempted, work instead to 'normalise' translation, so that reading it feels like an everyday and unremarkable event. Bucking the trend After this gradual advance on many fronts, even those notorious British figures no longer look quite so sluggish as before. Last year, the Wales-based agency Literature Across Frontiers calculated that "General translations grew by 53 per cent between 1990 and 2012, and literary translations by 66 per cent". This spring, research commissioned from Nielsen BookScan by the Man Booker International Prize brought even more upbeat news. Since 2001, sales by volume of translated fiction have risen by 96% in Britain. Over the same period, physical sales of all fiction dropped by around 3.7%. Spectacularly, translated fiction has bucked the market. More remarkably, "On average, translated fiction books sell better than books originally written in English, particularly in literary fiction". Translations of literary fiction compose 3.5% of all fiction titles but 7% of sales. Shout that finding from the rooftops in whichever tongue you prefer: translated fiction performs twice as well as the norm. In more ways than one, translation does not devalue; it enriches. Now, numbers aren't everything. The quality of reading experience should ultimately count for more than the quantity of units sold. All the same, it must give a welcome tonic to translators and their champions when the stats confirm what the soul already knows. T ranslated novels by female writers are the palomino unicorns of the publishing world". So Katy Derbyshire, a literary translator working from German into English, aptly described the status of women writers in translation earlier this year. 1 We all know that translations make up only a tiny fraction of the books published in the UK and US every year. What is less known is that only about a quarter of this tiny percentage are books by women. Until I attended a seminar on women in translation at the 2014 International Translation Day, I had never consciously considered the issue of gender balance in literary translation. Indeed, I had not considered the issue of gender balance in books at all. Derbyshire was one of the speakers at this event, with Jane Bradley, Editor-in-Chief of For Books' Sake, and writer and academic Sophie Mayer. They explored why, despite the fact that some of our finest translators are women, fewer female authors are translated, published and promoted in the Anglophone publishing market than their male counterparts. The debate had started the previous year, when Alison Anderson, a full-time literary translator, wrote an article asking Where are the Women in Translation? 2 She had asked, why aren't women translators promoting more women authors, and did the Why aren't more female authors translated, asks the voice of wom SHOWCASING TALENT Deborah Smith, Han Kang (centre right) and the other shortlisted authors and translators © JANIE AIRLEY