Selling books in translation to the British market has long been an uphill struggle. Of all titles published in the UK each year only 3% are translated. That is compared with 13% in Germany, 27% in France, 28% in Spain, 40% in Turkey and 70% in Slovenia. This is a ‘monstrosity’ according to Christopher MacLehose, who ran Harvill, a pre-eminent publisher of translated fiction, for 21 years. He describes Britain’s performance in this area as ‘at the bottom of the league, a laughing stock and a tragedy’.
So why are translated books so unpopular in this country? The problem seems to begin with writers. Talking about the experience of having his first novel translated into German David Baddiel explains: ‘Language in novels is not simply about the conveyance of meaning. It’s also about the resonance of the words, the rhythm and flow of sentence structure, wordplay’.
