In her 2001 collection of essays about the publishing and culture industries, Thank You for Not Reading, Dubravka Ugresic writes, half-jokingly, about how being an international writer working in a “small” language (Croatian), and on top of that being a woman, makes it incredibly unlikely that she’ll ever fully break into the English-language literary market.
It’s a funny bit—the book is loaded with anecdotes of this sort that strike a little too close to home if you’re say, an editor, bookseller, or, especially, an agent—but also one that’s all too true . . . or at least historically has been.
Publishers are interested
We can shelve the idea of publishers being uninterested in translation for now, and admit that, in 2023, far more readers, critics, editors, and booksellers are interested in works written in languages other than French, German, and Spanish, but the disparity between the number of men being published and reviewed versus the number of women receiving equal treatment has been well documented by organizations such as VIDA: Women in the Literary Arts, backed up in other surveys, and generally accepted by anyone in the industry.
Thanks in part to the infamous 3% statistic (that only 3% of the books published in America originated in languages other than English), for much of the 2000s, the narrative surrounding translation-publishing focused on sheer volume and not necessarily the breakdown between books written by women versus those written by men.
In 2013, thanks to the work of translator Alison Anderson and research biologist and book blogger Meytal Radzinski, that started to change. They both started writing about the dearth of women in translation, and, bolstered by data from the Translation Database (sponsored by Publishers Weekly and accessible to all on PW’s website), were able to demonstrate that all of the major publishers of translation (Dalkey Archive, New Directions, Archipelago, Europa Editions, etc.) were to an alarming degree heavily weighted toward male authors.
Cause for alarm
To put a fine point on it, between 2008 and 2013, 72% of all works of fiction published in translation into English for the first time ever (no retranslations or reprints are included in the Translation Database) were written by authors identifying as male, and only 26% by writers identifying as female. (The remaining percentage are anthologies, co-written books, or by authors not identifying as male or female.) That’s a 46% gap—a cause for alarm no matter what industry is under discussion.
Women in Translation Month was launched in 2014 with the aspirational goal of helping to balance this out. A social media campaign to start (employing the #WITMonth hashtag to draw attention to particular works and encourage everyone to read at least one book by a woman in translation during the month of August) the project has expanded over the past decade to include: promotions and sales by publishers; a year in which And Other Stories published only women writers; the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation; and a significant increase in media attention.
And, not to bury the lead too much, it has greatly impacted the make-up of literature in translation to the point where that 46% gap referenced above has almost completely dissipated.
The most illuminating way to observe this impact is by looking at rolling three-year averages of the percentage of books by men in translation versus those by women. (In brief, the three-year average totals the number of books published in the current year and the two previous, thus smoothing out any large anomalies.) As can be seen in the chart on the opposite page, the percentage of works of fiction by women in translation has steadily increased since 2008—the year the Translation Database was launched—starting at only 24% in 2008-2010, hitting 31% in 2014-2016, 40% in 2019-2021, and currently stands at 47% for 2022-2024 (for which data is, obviously, incomplete).
Encouraging, but room for improvement
This is quite encouraging, and backs up the sheer volume of tweets, Instagram posts, TikToks, podcast episodes, and traditional articles written throughout August in honor of Women in Translation Month.
There is room for improvement though. If you look at the breakdown for the 20 presses who have published the most fiction translations since 2014, women make up only 38% of the total. There are some notable exceptions, including World Editions (63% of their titles since 2014 have been from women writers), Amazon Crossing (60%), Deep Vellum (51%), Orenda (49%), and Open Letter, Europa Editions, Two Lines, and Other Press (all at 42%). But the remaining 13 presses on this list are all below the industry average.
Nevertheless, there’s never been a better time (since 2008 at least) for discovering women in translation. And if agents, publishers, and editors remain open to female voices from around the world, this trend is sure to continue.
