Given that only a tiny percentage of novels in English have been translated from another language, is it really worth all this effort?
The short answer is yes. The extraordinary success of Karl Ove Knausgård and Elena Ferrante in recent years is proof that fiction from other lands has a global following. Last year a new report from Literature Across Frontiers (LAF) finally put some figures on this. The statistics show a steady growth of literary translations over the past two decades, both in absolute numbers and as a share of the whole. The number of literary translations into English grew by two-thirds between 1990 and 2012, accounting for a peak of 5.23% of the whole in 2011 against an average of just 3%. Specialist foreign-fiction publishers, such as Quercus, Pereine and Pushkin, have all sprung up in the past decade or so.
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