Have the Anglos Lost Too Much in Translation?

Publishing Perpectives
April 15, 2011 • Editorial by Kelvin Smith

A spirited defense of reading “foreign” books

When was the last time you read a book written in a foreign language? If you are a fan of crime fiction, probably it wasn’t so long ago. Or you might be one of the millions of readers of Paolo Coelho or Haruki Murakami. On the face of it we are becoming more open to the literature of the world, and translation flows in Europe are more varied and less Anglo-centric than is often supposed.

But no, what I mean is, when was the last time you read a book written in a foreign language in the original language? If you live in Denmark or the Netherlands, you probably do this most of the time, and if you are a student in parts of Europe or Asia, much of your reading will be in English. In Africa and many other parts of the world, the language you read in is probably not the language you speak at home. But if you are American, English or Australian you may never have even opened a book in anything other than English, and very few bookshops in the Anglophone world carry anything other than a smattering of texts. Charity shops have a much better selection!

Book covers, bookseller listings and book reviews often don’t even tell us that a book is translated (or if it does it is very understated), and it can look as if we are being encouraged not to recognize the skill or even the presence of the translator. If we are not going to build even higher walls around the Anglophone ghetto, we must all make it known that we find the non-English exciting and valuable, not some dirty secret of publishing, representing little more than the unpleasant additional cost of translation.


Perhaps publishers need to think more about what they are doing to our language, too. They have a direct influence on what is written as well as how it is translated, as Julian Barnes has pointed out.

“I remember hearing a well-known British novelist admit in a radio interview that he had paused at one point in his writing, thought of the pain he might be inflicting on his Scandinavian translators, and decided to make things easier for them. Apart from this being a denial of your own language, it can easily lead to the sort of international prose that is like an airline meal: it feeds all, doesn’t actually poison anyone, but isn’t noticeably nutritious.” (Julian Barnes, London Review of Books, Vol. 32 No. 22. 18 November 2010, pages 7-11.)

Read the full essay at Publishing Perpectives