Original Language Stats

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Original Language Stats

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1Dilara86
Nov 21, 2018, 12:45 pm

Are you happy with the number of books you’ve read that were originally written in a language other than English or your native language? I feel like I read quite a bit in translation, and yet English and French dominate hugely… I’m clearly not doing as well as I thought I was!

The only languages in double digits in my stats are:

68 German (ger)

58 Russian (rus)

47 Italian (ita)

44 Spanish (spa)

43 Japanese (jpn)

38 Arabic (ara)

21 Swedish (swe)

15 Chinese (chi)

13 Korean (kor)

12 Portuguese (por)

10 Danish (dan)

10 Dutch (dut)

10 Hungarian (hun)

What about you?

2SassyLassy
Nov 21, 2018, 2:55 pm

That's a huge amount of reading you've done.

Good question. Until this year, my fiction reading has been in the 50% range or more in translation, which I am quite happy with, although there is always room for more. This year's reading looks as if it will come in closer to 40%, which is disappointing, but there's still time to improve. in that group, French would dominate, probably due to my reading of the Rougon Macquart cycle.

3lilisin
Nov 21, 2018, 9:11 pm

My total stats are as shown below. But really it turns out I don't read that much work in translation as I thought as the books in the top four are all languages that I read in that language. Only the Japanese category, 40 out of the 55 or so I read in translation since I wasn't yet fluent enough to read those at the time I read them, but now I've switched over to reading in the original language.

120 English (eng)
103 French (fre)
55 Japanese (jpn)
21 Spanish (spa)

So that leaves me with these that are books written in translation and while the stats definitely aren't accurate (for example the Korean showed up as only 1 book and I manually changed it to 4), and some languages are left off, I'm definitely not reading that much in translation.

11 German (ger)
2 Chinese (chi)
4 Italian (ita)
5 Russian (rus)
3 Czech (cze)
4 Korean (kor)
1 Norwegian (Nynorsk) (nno)
1 Portuguese (por)
1 Vietnamese (vie)

But as my interests lie primarily in Japan and France, at least these stats reflect my interests. I know that someday I will branch out into new fields of interest and I will have a lot of fun looking up works of translation for those new topics.

4thorold
Editado: Nov 22, 2018, 12:23 pm

Oooh - an excuse to compile some stats! :-)

After a bit of fighting with Power Edit to get rid of the many "not set", the original languages for which I have more than nine books are these (there are a further 20 languages with under ten books). I wouldn't guarantee that it's completely correct or consistent - it's easy to mess up the data:

2936 (75.7%) English (eng)
309 (8.0%) German (ger)
230 (5.9%) French (fre)
160 (4.1%) Dutch (dut)
63 (1.6%) Spanish (spa)
36 (0.9%) Swedish (swe)
26 (0.7%) Italian (ita)
22 (0.6%) Japanese (jpn)
11 (0.3%) Russian (rus)
10 (0.3%)) Czech (cze)
10 (0.3%) Greek (Ancient) (grc)
10 (0.3%) Portuguese (por)

As far as primary language goes, I seem to have 310 books (7.9%) in German, 205 (5.3%) in French, 169 (4.3%) in Dutch, 37 (0.9%) in Spanish and 14 (0.4%) in Italian, plus a few classical texts, language books, etc. (These percentages are slightly off, because the LT stats for "Language" counts both primary and secondary languages, so dictionaries and things are counted twice.)

From the general LT stats it's difficult to see which are translations - my French, Dutch and German books all include a handful of translations into those languages from others, and of course there are some translations from French, Dutch, Italian and Spanish among my English books (only one English translation from German, AFAIK, and that was a book I had to get for an English-medium literature course).

Since the beginning of 2017, I've kept language data for books I read in a parallel database which it's a bit easier to query. I've been reading about 63% in English, 11% German, 17% French, 6% Dutch and 3% Spanish (out of 289 books).
82% of my reading was in the original language. The main translated languages were Swedish (5.5%), Japanese (4.8%), Danish (2.4%) and Icelandic (1.7%). Spot the influence of the theme reads!

5Dilara86
Nov 23, 2018, 7:52 am

You’ve inspired me to dig deeper…

So far this year, 35% of my reading has been in translation, from the following languages: 7% Spanish, 4% Russian, 3% Japanese and German, 2% Chinese, Portuguese, Korean, Italian and Turkish, 1.3% Arabic (1 book and 2/3), less than 1% (ie, one book) Danish, Icelandic, Catalan, Polish, Albanian, Swedish, Urdu, Norwegian, Kannada, Hebrew (1/3 of a book), Lithuanian. For the most part, they were translated into French. I admire all of you multilingual people!

11% of my reading was originally written in a non-Indo-European language. About a third of the featured languages were non-Indo-European. It would have been even less if not for the Japanese- and Korean-themed quarter.

On the non-translated side: 51% of the books I read this year were in French – that’s the highest it’s ever been - and 14% in English. I also read a record number of books written in either English or French by non-native writers, such as 150 Dutch & Belgian Recipes: Discover the Authentic Tastes of Two Classic cuisines written in English by Dutch authors or Apatride written in French by an Indian author. Not to mention bilingual or multilingual authors from former colonised countries who use a European language as their vehicular language.

6thorold
Editado: Nov 24, 2018, 7:30 am

I've been playing around with my data, since it's miserable weather outside anyway...
I wanted to find a way to represent the matrix of translations, showing text language vs. original language, but it's tricky to do it in a way you can actually see, given the big range of numbers involved. This is the clearest I've got so far:

This is the distribution by text language (colours) and original language (x-axis) for:

Books read November 2013 to November 2018:


Books read April 2007 to November 2013:


...and just for fun, this is the same thing for books in my legacy collection, i.e. books acquired before I joined LT and not recorded as having been read in the last 11 years:



...and that leaves the TBR shelf:



All very pretty, but it is disappointing to see quite how little there is that was originally written in non-European languages (under 1% overall).

7MarthaJeanne
Nov 24, 2018, 8:04 am

The thing is, reading in translation is never really satisfactory. You normally don't notice what you are missing if the translator is fairly competent and you are not familiar with the original language and culture, and since this is the normal case, and it's the closest you can come, it is acceptable.

The further apart the original language and culture are to the target language and culture, the harder it is to translate, and probably also the harder it is to find someone competent to do the translation. Ideally the translator should be native to the target and near native in the original, but the longer you live in a different culture, the more you and your native culture move apart.

I do end up reading books written in English in German translation, because the subjects interest me, but not enough to want to purchase the English when the German is at the library. The result is often sitting and trying to figure out what the author actually wrote. Sometimes the objective meaning is clear, but the intent isn't. Humour is very hard to get right.

8alvaret
Dez 1, 2018, 6:23 am

Oh, I love reading statistics! I'm bad at registrating my reading on LT but I have a spreadsheet for 2018.

Original language for my 2018 reading
English: 59%
Swedish: 15%
French: 7%
Russian: 4%
Norwegian: 3%
Spanish: 3%
Italian: 2%
German: 2%
Danish, Icelandic, Japanese, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish and Greek, 1 book (ca 1%) each.

By authors from a total of 26 countries.

Text language
English: 57%
Swedish: 23%
Norwegian: 18%

Read in translation: 40.5% (includes books originally written in English but which I read in a Swedish or Norwegian translation)