The Ten Most Translated Books in the World

30th September 2021

The Ten Most Translated Books in the World.

Translation is a particular theme for TripFiction. See, for example, our posts on Translators – the unsung heroes of modern fiction or Found in translation… (top book translators). Translators can make or break the foreign edition of a novel… they have the great responsibility of re-creating the original work in a new language. Their understanding of the nuances of the original, plus their own writing style, is critical to success. They are co-creators, but they have been largely unsung. We have done our bit by, wherever possible, including the name of the translator alongside that of the author in our database. Publishers are starting to sing the praises of the translator but some, sadly, are still oblivious to the #namethetranslator movement.

We were therefore delighted to see that today (30th September) has been designated as International Translations Day and that Preply, the international online language school, has commissioned special research to find out exactly how many translated books there are in the world. They excluded religious texts and countries where works had been translated less than five times.

The top ten books in translation are:

1. The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (382+ languages) – France

2. The Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi (300+ languages) – Italy

3. Alice’s adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carrol (175+ languages) – England

4. Andersen’s Fairy Tales by Hans Christian Andersen (160+ languages) – Denmark

5. Testament by Taras Shevchenko (150+ languages) – Ukraine

6. The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes (140+ languages) – Spain

7. The Way to Happiness by L. Ron Hubbard (112+ languages) – United States

8. The Adventures of Tintin by Georges Prosper Remi (93+ languages) – Belgium

9. The Tragedy of Man by Imre Madách (90+ languages) – Hungary

10. The Alchemist by Paulo Cohelo (80+ languages) – Brazil

The full research is shown HERE on the Preply site.  The site also features a series of maps showing the top translated books by continent. All continents can be viewed on the site but here, as a taster, is the map for North America

It’s a quite fascinating piece of research, and we hope you will want to dive in!

You can also sign an Open Letter created by The Society of Authors #TranslatorsOnTheCover HERE and author Joanna Harris on Twitter has created a thread about translation which you might like to check out HERE

Tony for the TripFiction team

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