# Spain translated more books in 1 year than **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [April 24, 2006, 10:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/spain-translated-more-books-in-1-year-than/354066 "2006-04-24T22:54:40Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 15\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![jharvey963](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/54ee81/32.png) [@jharvey963](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jharvey963)\ **Post date:** [April 24, 2006, 10:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/spain-translated-more-books-in-1-year-than/354066/1 "2006-04-24T22:54:40Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![Shagnasty](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/9dc877/32.png) [@Shagnasty](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shagnasty)\ **Post date:** [April 24, 2006, 11:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/spain-translated-more-books-in-1-year-than/354066/2 "2006-04-24T23:03:17Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![jharvey963](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/54ee81/32.png) [@jharvey963](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jharvey963)\ **Post date:** [April 24, 2006, 11:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/spain-translated-more-books-in-1-year-than/354066/3 "2006-04-24T23:21:49Z")
> [@Shagnasty](#): > > Who was the author? > > . . . > > 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. ---
**Author:** ![II\_Gyan\_II](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/bbe5ce/32.png) [@II\_Gyan\_II](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/II_Gyan_II)\ **Post date:** [April 24, 2006, 11:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/spain-translated-more-books-in-1-year-than/354066/4 "2006-04-24T23:43:00Z")
Seems to be [true](http://www.nakbaonline.org/download/UNDP/EnglishVersion/Ar-Human-Dev-2002.pdf)(PDF): > [@](#): > > The figures for translated books are also discouraging. The Arab world translates > about 330 books annually, one fifth of the number that Greece translates. The cumulative > total of translated books since the Caliph MaaÕmounÕs time (the ninth century) is about > 100,000, almost the average that Spain translates in one year (Galal, S., 1999). ---
**Author:** ![Mops](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mops/32/16494_2.png) [@Mops](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mops)\ **Post date:** [April 24, 2006, 11:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/spain-translated-more-books-in-1-year-than/354066/5 "2006-04-24T23:51:23Z")
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](http://www.wienerzeitung.at/DesktopDefault.aspx?TabID=3948&Alias=wzo&cob=225128¤tpage=0) 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): - in the 1970s, number of books translated in the Arab world = one-fifth of number of books translated in Greece. - in the 1980s, number of books translated pre million people, per five years: Arab world 4.4, Hungary 519, Spain 920 - year 1991: 102,000 new books published in North America; 6,500 in the Arab world. ---
**Author:** ![even\_sven](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/dfb087/32.png) [@even\_sven](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/even_sven)\ **Post date:** [April 25, 2006, 12:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/spain-translated-more-books-in-1-year-than/354066/6 "2006-04-25T00:29:28Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![JRDelirious](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jrdelirious/32/9531_2.png) [@JRDelirious](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JRDelirious)\ **Post date:** [April 25, 2006, 1:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/spain-translated-more-books-in-1-year-than/354066/7 "2006-04-25T01:47:06Z")
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 😛 ). ---
**Author:** ![Antonius\_Block](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/51bf81/32.png) [@Antonius\_Block](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Antonius_Block)\ **Post date:** [April 25, 2006, 8:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/spain-translated-more-books-in-1-year-than/354066/8 "2006-04-25T08:22:26Z")
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](http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2004-04-27-rogan-en.html): > [@](#): > > There is an irony in the thought that the Arab world today, representing 270 million people spread over 22 countries, can only manage one fifth the translations of modern Greece. Such round figures are hard to substantiate: the National Book Centre of Greece, founded by the ministry of culture, does not keep records on translations into Greek. However, they reported a total of 6,826 books published in Greece in 2002. While it is possible that one quarter of Greece’s publications were translations, it is not clear that this would be a sign of publishing vitality. The figure for Spain is spurious; its total figure for book publishing, of which translations would be a minor part, does not exceed the tens of thousands each year. Yet these shortcomings in the statistics have not hindered the international reception of the AHDR’s data on Arab book publishing. 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.](http://www.infotoday.com/it/jul01/bruno.htm) [/li][li][Today more than 300,000 new books spew out of worldwide presses every year.](http://www.linezine.com/5.2/articles/tdeatae.htm) [/li][li][300,000 new books published worldwide each year](http://www.amanet.org/books/catalog/0814407536_ch.htm) [/li][li][…60,000 new books that spew out of U.S. presses every year, or the more than 300,000 books published worldwide.](http://www.assureconsulting.com/books/attn.shtml) [/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.](http://www.princetoninfo.com/200405/40512c03.html)[/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.](http://www.asis.org/Bulletin/Jun-95/zhang.html)[/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 Spain** is 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](http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&safe=off&q=%22More+than+25+per+cent+of+book+titles+published+in+Spain%22&btnG=Search): > [@](#): > > More than 25 per cent of book titles published in Spain in 2003 were translated texts. Spain has, over the last 30 years since [Franco](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franscico_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? ---
**Author:** ![Paul\_in\_Qatar](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ccd318/32.png) [@Paul\_in\_Qatar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Paul_in_Qatar)\ **Post date:** [April 25, 2006, 8:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/spain-translated-more-books-in-1-year-than/354066/9 "2006-04-25T08:35:15Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![Maastricht](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/a88e57/32.png) [@Maastricht](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Maastricht)\ **Post date:** [April 25, 2006, 9:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/spain-translated-more-books-in-1-year-than/354066/10 "2006-04-25T09:58:49Z")
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](http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=1&categ_id=14&article_id=2876) Fatimah Hamdan writes about: \*Reading, books and literature, three things alien to Lebanon. \* > [@](#): > > We wish there were some more constructive articles in preparation for the Arab world being featured at the Frankfurt Book Fair this fall, but maybe shaming readers is the way to go. Two more articles jump on that bandwagon: > In The Daily Star today Fatimah Hamdan writes about: Reading, books and literature, three things alien to Lebanon. Hamdan notes: > While monitoring the media one cannot but notice the absence of the word “book.” Whether televised, broadcast on radio or printed, there is not one promotion for a single book, regardless of its origin. Not a single program broadcast talks about a book, not even annually. The only books that are promoted are cooking and astrology books. And in an article titled “Books and Football: A Question of Priorities” in [Arab News](http://www.arabnews.com/?page=7§ion=0&article=43904&d=27&m=4&y=2004), Abeer Mishkhas notes: > [@](#): > > It is strange that when it comes to football, the Arab world is always ready; the money is there and we are bombarded with slogans about its vitality and importance. Football always comes before books here – but is it a question of money or mentality ? ---
**Author:** ![Balthisar](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/balthisar/32/2825_2.png) [@Balthisar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Balthisar)\ **Post date:** [April 25, 2006, 10:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/spain-translated-more-books-in-1-year-than/354066/11 "2006-04-25T10:19:07Z")
> [@Shagnasty](#): > > 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. 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. ---
**Author:** ![Eurograff](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/df705f/32.png) [@Eurograff](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Eurograff)\ **Post date:** [April 25, 2006, 8:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/spain-translated-more-books-in-1-year-than/354066/12 "2006-04-25T20:00:53Z")
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](http://www.undp.org.sa/Reports/AHDR%202003%20-%20English.pdf), or AHDR2, where the number is 10000, a full order of magnitude smaller: > [@](#): > > Most Arab countries have not learned from the lessons of the past and the field of translation remains chaotic. In terms of quantity, and notwithstanding the increase in the number of translated books from 175 per year during 1970-1975 to 330, the number of books translated in the Arab world is one fifth of the number translated in Greece. The aggregate total of translated books from the Al-Ma’moon era to the present day amounts to 10,000 books - equivalent to what Spain translates in a single year (Shawki Galal, in Arabic, 1999, 87)[sup]3[/sup]. From page 67 of the report (or 82 in that PDF). The footnote then reads: > [@](#): > > [sup]3[/sup] This number was erroneously stated as 100,000 in AHDR1. 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. ---
**Author:** ![maziiadar](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/f1d935/32.png) [@maziiadar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/maziiadar)\ **Post date:** [April 25, 2006, 8:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/spain-translated-more-books-in-1-year-than/354066/13 "2006-04-25T20:26:35Z")
I am sorry this is wrong. > [@even sven](#): > > 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. 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. ---
**Author:** ![DanBlather](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/f4b2a3/32.png) [@DanBlather](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DanBlather)\ **Post date:** [April 25, 2006, 11:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/spain-translated-more-books-in-1-year-than/354066/14 "2006-04-25T23:34:08Z")
> [@JRDelirious](#): > > 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? Ironically enough, using Arabic numerals. 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![What\_Exit](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/what_exit/32/10652_2.png) [@What\_Exit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/What_Exit)\ **Post date:** [January 13, 2026, 1:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/spain-translated-more-books-in-1-year-than/354066/15 "2026-01-13T13:31:16Z")
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