Culture Flows Through English Channels, according to Rüdiger Wischenbart:
Worldwide, he said, between 50 percent and 60 percent of all translations of books originate from English originals. It’s sometimes higher: 70 percent of all books translated into Serbian, for instance, have English originals. In return, only 3 percent to 6 percent of all worldwide book translations are from foreign languages into English. English speakers, it seems, are talking a lot but listening very little. If this were the airline industry, we’d be talking about the kind of world where you can’t fly from Moscow to Berlin without changing in London.Non-Anglo cultures are also listening less and less to each other, more and more to us. “In 2005,” Wischenbart reported, “a mere 9.4 percent of all translations into German came from French originals…. Yet, this still brings French comfortably to second place in the overall translation statistics in Germany, as compared to 2.7 percent for Italian (number 3), or Dutch (2.5 percent, number 4) or Spanish (2.3 percent, number 5). Sixty-two percent of all translations were of English originals. All other languages and cultural in-roads seem like peanuts in comparison, and no politically well-intentioned process will ever mend this imbalance…. Centrifugal forces are working against globalization, resulting in culturally fragmented islands and regions, with few cohesive lines in between.”