At Asymptote Mahmud Rahman begins a series on On the Dearth of South Asian Translations in the U.S..
As he notes, according to the Three Percent translation databases:
These numbers are for both poetry and fiction, by the way -- and, for example, the only works of fiction translated from the Hindi published in US editions over the past two years appears to have been works by Uday Prakash -- The Girl with the Golden Parasol and The Walls of Delhi -- both of which were licensed (i.e. not commissioned by the US publishers, but rather previously published abroad (the latter by University of Western Australia Publishing (seriously), as I recently mentioned)).
I'm looking forward to the next installment in the series, where Rahman will be: "talking about the experiences of six Hindi/Urdu translators and their encounters with U.S. publishers". Sounds like some depressing reading .....
As he notes, according to the Three Percent translation databases:
South Asian languages barely make these lists: in the last five years, out of 2121 books, only 19 were from South Asian languages (only Urdu, Hindi, Bangla, Tamil).(And he's not even looking at even less represented non-Indian languages (Thai, Burmese, Malay, Indonesian, etc.).)
These numbers are for both poetry and fiction, by the way -- and, for example, the only works of fiction translated from the Hindi published in US editions over the past two years appears to have been works by Uday Prakash -- The Girl with the Golden Parasol and The Walls of Delhi -- both of which were licensed (i.e. not commissioned by the US publishers, but rather previously published abroad (the latter by University of Western Australia Publishing (seriously), as I recently mentioned)).
I'm looking forward to the next installment in the series, where Rahman will be: "talking about the experiences of six Hindi/Urdu translators and their encounters with U.S. publishers". Sounds like some depressing reading .....