I heard an author I respect cite the following fact:
“Spain translated more books into Spanish last year than have been translated into Arabic in the last 900 years.”
I don’t want to start a flame war or anything. I just want to know: is this factually true? Or is it a misrepresentation?
Thanks,
J.
Who was the author?
Also, does Spain have some kind of translation campaign going right now grabbing all kinds of previously untranslated obscure works? Also, why just Spain? You would think that they would doubling up on the work going on in Mexico and other countries in Latin America as well as the large Spanish translation industry in the U.S.
Assuming that statement is true, it means that Spain itself found enough untranslated books that weren’t touched in either the U.S., the rest of Europe, and Latin America, and that effort equals the translation done by the entire world for anything published in the last 900 years in Arabic.
It doesn’t sound very believable to me.
The author was Sam Harris.
I believe his point was not that Spain is translating a lot of books, but that so few books have ever been translated into Arabic.
It was very surprizing to me, too, which is why I’m asking for independent confirmation. Normally, I respect the research that Sam does.
J.
Seems to be true(PDF):
Historian Dan Diner was widely cited (last year if I recall correctly) with numbers in the same vein - perhaps it was the same data referred to? I have only found a German-language book review which cites the following numbers (this is obviously a third-hand cite and the selection of metrics looks a bit arbitrary, possibly indicating some cherry-picking):
Keep in mind that Arabic plays an odd role. It’s not unlike Latin used to be, in that it is an International language of the educated and used in things of pan-Islamic interest. A person who can speak Arabic can interact with the culture around them- unlike Spain which is alone in speaking Spanish in Europe. But novels and the like are more likely to be read in a local language (which may be a form of Arabic quite different from literary Arabic. So the two arn’t really comperable.
Setting aside the plausibility of the specific numbers offered (a **hundred thousand ** in Spain *alone * :eek: ??? As in, a hundred thousand distinct titles in one year :dubious: ??? How did they count?), it’s plausible that the Arab world is way behind in penetration by non-Arabic titles, vis-a-vis other language communities.
But then it becomes kinda chicken-and-eggish – the “Arab World” includes a lot of jurisdictions where the access to education, literacy rate, disposable income, and political climate make for a lousy market for import books. While Spain has all the conditions for a high-demand market for reading material… of all kinds (maybe indeed Spain translated howevermanythousand titles last year… but one third had the words “Da Vinci” or “Conspiracy” in the title 
).
The idea that 100,000 new titles are translated each year in Spain is so laughably erroneous that it not only destroys any point that might have been made (presumably, that the Arab-speaking world isolates itself from other cultures), but also seriously reduces the credibility of any commentator that repeats it. [Please note that I’m not in any way criticizing the OP - who is asking whether it’s true or not, or any other Doper who responded in this thread.]
The sole source for that idea appears to be the 1999 study mentioned in II Gyan II’s quote, namely Translation in the Arab Homeland: Reality and Challenge, written by S. Galal and published by Cairo’s Higher Council for Culture. This was then used heavily in the 2002 Arab Human Development Report. From an analysis of the “translation” claim here:
It’s hard to find reliable statistics for new books published each year ranked by country. Many sources claim around 300,000 new titles published annually worldwide:[ul]
[li]300,000 books are published each year worldwide. [/li][li]Today more than 300,000 new books spew out of worldwide presses every year. [/li][li]300,000 new books published worldwide each year [/li][li]…60,000 new books that spew out of U.S. presses every year, or the more than 300,000 books published worldwide. [/li][/ul]
Here’s a book that claims one million:
[ul]
[li]One of the surprise critical hits of 2003 was “So Many Books” by the Mexican critic Gabriel Zaid… Fifty years after the introduction of television, he writes, the number of titles published worldwide each year has increased fourfold from 250,000 to 1 million - from 100 books for every million humans to 167. A book is published somewhere in the world every 30 seconds.[/ul][/li]Another source, regarding books published in China, would be consistent with the “one million” claim (given the years reported):
[ul][li]About 80,000 new book titles were produced in 1990 (the United Kingdom, by comparison, produced a little more than 60,000 titles and Japan, about 40,000). In 1993, over 100,000 new book titles were added. Among the total number of new titles published worldwide, every one out of seven to eight books is published in China.[/ul][/li]A figure of several tens of thousands for all new titles published in Spain each year (as suggested by the quoted section earlier in this post) seems reasonable compared to the UK figure of 60,000 in 1990, given that Spain has about 75% of the UK’s population and shares a similar status as “mother country” to a globally-important language. Thus, the idea that 100,000 new titles are translated each year in Spainis ludicrous.
So, what’s the real number?
There’s a Financial Times article that I can’t link to directly due to subscription requirements, but the relevant passage is (currently, on my PC) quoted in the only result on this Google search page:
Spain has, over the last 30 years since Franco’s death, moved from a culturally-isolated dictatorship into one of the world’s most progressive democracies, so it shouldn’t be at all surprising to find that there’s a huge effort to translate the backlog of non-Spanish books that were unavailable prior to 1975.
Given the above, it wouldn’t be too surprising to find that 10,000 new titles are translated in Spain each year. Perhaps all of the pundits have been replicating a typo or a numerical miscalculation?
A line like that appeared a couple of years ago in a UN report of the Arab World. It caused a lot gnashing of teeth locally. I cannot recall if it was ‘Spain’ or ‘Greece’ and if it was ‘900 years’ or ‘9 years.’ My memory fails.
The report went on to add that the National Library of Saudi Arabia has fewer books than the municipal library of Muncie, Indiana or some such place. Also most of the books at the National Library were very old, while most of the titles in the city library were written in the past umpty-ump years.
Apparently, it isn’t so much that the Arab world isn’t open to translated books, but they aren’t as big as the Western world on reading books at all, period.
I’ve read that a person sitting alone reading a book in public in the Arab world will be regarded by Arabs as a lonely person in dire need of rescuing, and he will be invited to join the nearest group for conversation.
Here are two articles on Arab reading culture.
In the Daily Star Fatimah Hamdan writes about: *Reading, books and literature, three things alien to Lebanon. *
And in an article titled “Books and Football: A Question of Priorities”
in Arab News, Abeer Mishkhas notes:
A lot of the popular fiction available in Mexico were translated in Spain. As soon as you start reading, you just know that it’s not Mexican-Spanish. Because of Mexico’s immense market size relative to most of Latin America, I’d venture a guess that the situation’s similar in the rest of Latin America.
On the other hand, I learned that The Simpsons is separately dubbed for each of the European and Latin American market.
Heh. The “Arab Human Development Report - 2002”, or AHDR1, has an error when stating the number of 100000 translated books (oddly appropriate, as the reports are compiled by Arabs themselves to highlight and illustrate the illiteracy and lack of cultural achievements troubling the Arab region ;)). This becomes evident when you read the followup (PDF Warnung) Arab Human Development Report - 2003, or AHDR2, where the number is 10000, a full order of magnitude smaller:
From page 67 of the report (or 82 in that PDF). The footnote then reads:
and 10,000 figure is implied to be the correct one in the 2004 report too.
So there you have it: ten thousand books translated into Arabic during the last millennium, incidentally the same number of books that Spain translates each year. What’s so surprising about it? There’s no reason to doubt these numbers: even small Finland manages to translate over 2000 books into Finnish each year for a market of five million, and in addition over 100 into Swedish, even though the 300000 Swedish-speaking Finns get most of their books from Sweden. If Spain does translations for the Latin American market too, ten thousand is a rather small amount even, and you haven’t mentioned the numerous Catalan, Galician and Basque translations yet either. On the other hand, only 330 books are translated into Arabic every year, and even this meager number is twice as much as the 1970s translations. Before that, it’s even smaller, leading to that barely 10 books per year through the whole thousand years average.
Also, even sven’s point doesn’t really apply here. The reports address specifically the Arab countries, not all Islamic countries, and while it’s true that many Arab countries’ dialect is very different from standard Arabic, this is irrelevant as the figures cited are for the total amount of translations into Arabic.
I am sorry this is wrong.
Written and broadcast materials in the Arab world are almost exclusively in standard Arabic, not dialects - you are giving completely wrong informations.
About translation, I know that English and French books are very much sold in original languages, so I guess that this may contribute to not bothering to translate.
Ironically enough, using Arabic numerals. 