The difficulty in finding Catalan texts in English is due to various reasons, but perhaps the most important is simply competition. Not only are Catalan books competing against one another for translation and publication into English, they are also competing against scores of books in other tongues. “There’s tremendous competition to be translated into English as a gateway language to the rest of the world,” Richard Davies, publishing director at Parthian Books, an independent Welsh publisher, told Metropolitan.
Not all that much gets chosen. Only three percent of what is published annually in English is in translation. Publishers perceive the English public as reluctant to read foreign authors. “US and UK publishers have an entrenched view that works in translation don’t sell,” said Haarlson Phillipps, an author and translator living in Barcelona.
Publishing executives seem to confirm this. “English readers are notoriously closed-minded to foreign literature,” said Michael O’Connell, sales and marketing manager at Peter Owen Publishers. “For instance, in Germany you could have 40 percent of books of foreign-language origin available in bookshops, and in the UK it would be a fraction of that, with books from a literary elite making up that fraction of published literature.”
The Institut Ramon Llull is an organisation run in part by the Catalan government, which offers grant money to aid in translations as part of its efforts to promote Catalan culture abroad. Of the 102 Catalan texts their grants helped to translate in 2009, only eight were in English. By comparison, 13 were published in French and 12 in German.
Then there are the two ever-present constraints of the business world—money and time. It costs an average of €10,000 to translate, produce and market a foreign text. “Why pay for translation when there are many hundreds of native English writers who will supply content for a pittance?” asked Haarlson Phillipps. Richard Davies, whose Parthian Books has published two Catalan-to-English translations since 2007 and is set to publish a third next month (Look Me in the Eye by Silvia Soler), estimated that with a novel it takes about two years to go from green-lighting a translation to the bookshelves. Two years and m10,000—that’s a significant bet for a publisher to place on a book that may garner little attention from readers.
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