“Is That a Fish in Your Ear” interview

One out of every five Americans is functionally bilingual — either because they are recent immigrants or they inherited it from their family or because they learned it at school or from residence abroad. That’s quite a high percentage for an English-speaking country. America isn’t as monolingual as people say it is — but it is culturally monolingual.

Readers of poetry in translation and advocates for linguistic diversity may be interested Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything, by David Bellos (one of Bellos’s crowning achievements is the translation of Georges Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual). I haven’t read it yet, but I did appreciate his interview, under the title “The Birth of the Google Translate Era,” at Salon. The quote about is from that interview, as is the following excerpt:

Far more titles are translated from English than into English every year. What does that say about the relative status of English-speaking culture in the world?

There is a huge asymmetry. Somewhere around 3 or 4 percent of books appearing in the U.S. each year are of foreign origin, whereas in other developed book cultures, like France or Germany, it ranges from 15 to 20 percent. The English language book industry is vastly bigger than any other, so 4 percent of all the books published in English is actually quite a large number of books.

It’s partly because English is written by so many different cultures around the world — South Africans, Australians, and so forth — so the English book world is already diverse. But the fundamental reason is that publishers remain convinced that translated books are a hard sell and that they don’t have much of a public. They don’t really believe in translated books as way of making money. It’s true that very few New York Times bestsellers were originally written in another language, but these are to some degree self-fulfilling prophecies. It’s something I really want to carry on struggling against. Publishers should be more courageous and less enclosed in the received idea that translation is expensive and needs a subsidy and is never going to appeal to anybody.