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?