Many non-English fiction authors have long achieved significant British and international acclaim, producing works with an impact on the literary scene which is hard to ignore. Among the most recently celebrated of these authors are Asako Yuzuki (whose novel Butter was 2024’s Waterstones Book of the Year), Elena Ferrante, Olga Tokarczuk, Min Jin Lee, Elif Shafak…the list goes on. Their popularity may have convinced some of us to pick up one of their celebrated works – most likely an English translation. If these names do not ring a bell or you are not exactly keen on reading in translation, however, your reading habits may be closer to those of the average British reader.
English speakers are notorious for preferring fiction originally written in their own language. When the Booker Prize Foundation announced their finding that sales of translated fiction in the UK had increased by 22% between 2021 and 2023, some may have been elated to hear that British readers were seemingly ready to give international authors a chance.
A closer look at the data, however, shows that the demographic that opts for reading in translation is actually quite small: the typical reader is 25 to 34 years old, female, and chooses books she knows will be a “challenging read.” At the other end of the scale, only 8% of retired readers purchase translated fiction. Even the remarkable 22% growth in sales loses some of its weight when you realise that this corresponds to merely 3.3% of fiction books sold in the United Kingdom in 2022 having been translations. This is certainly not representative of all of Europe: in a 2020 article, Publisher Little Island notes an increased interest in translated fiction across the United Kingdom and Ireland, but confirms that in other European countries, the share of translations is significantly higher.
Why does the UK avoid translated fiction?
With translations into English being more common than into any other language, why do British readers exhibit such resistance to them? Maybe it is the worry of cultural differences complicating understanding, of important aspects becoming “lost in translation.” Reading in translation, to varying degrees, requires being open to foreignness – and while not all translated texts are hard to understand, those centred around different lived realities than those of many British readers are certainly more likely to necessitate an open, curious mind. For this reason, those looking for casual, easy entertainment may be deterred from indulging in international fiction, picking up a book that promises comfort rather than complications. The Booker Prize Foundation findings seem to confirm this.
One would expect other European literatures, then, to fare especially well. After all, their origin is geographically close to that of British readers, and cultural particularities are potentially easier to grasp. Yet surprisingly, the most successful non-English literature in the UK is, by far, Japanese, making up a whole 14 out of the 30 most popular translated books in 2023 and producing global successes such as Asako Yuzuki’s Butter, Mieko Kawakami’s Breasts and Eggs, Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s Before the Coffee Gets Cold, or Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman. Korean literature, too, is gaining in popularity.
Indeed, some readers seem to actively seek out this unfamiliarity, whether to challenge themselves, learn more about another culture, or simply broaden their literary horizons. Of course, this interest in the unfamiliar is to be appreciated – but it is important to recognise that publishers play a significant role in shaping our expectations of international fiction. They, too, have picked up on these trends and managed to capitalise on them, shaping the country’s reading experiences in the process.
The world as seen through literary tropes
The literary landscape is often framed by stereotypes: Scandinavian countries are associated with Nordic noir, while Chinese authors are commonly understood to excel at poetry (or, more recently, science fiction). A look at Japanese fiction in the United Kingdom curiously paints the picture of a literary world almost exclusively dominated by women: the recent rise in female Japanese writers has created an environment in which a Japanese contemporary novel will be assumed to present either an intense yet emotionally nuanced feminist social critique or a cosy, indulgent tale thin on plot set in a café or bookshop (not to mention the cats that will, without fail, appear both in the book’s name and on its cover).
As much as these trends may feel like a window into the world of a foreign culture – and there is indeed a move towards female perspectives in both Japanese literature and social discourse – such repertoires are more often than not meticulously curated by publishers to make Sweden, Norway, China, Japan or any other country more accessible to readers. This can come at the expense of diversity and nuance. Recent discourse on the “tropification of literature” is highly relevant here: entire countries, at a time, become tropes, reinforced by blurbs and cover designs that further promote static images of what they should stand for.
Perhaps this is what makes many young readers gravitate towards translated fiction: they pick up a book by a female Japanese author, expecting feminist revelations and protagonists somehow isolated from society and, due to the publishers’ choice of works to translate, they usually get what they are expecting. In one sense, tropes and clear associations crafted by publishers are not necessarily bad. They can help us find exactly what we are looking for – but we need to keep in mind that they can also distort our vision and skew our understanding of a culture or country by making it seem more homogenous than it truly is.
In addition to tropes, some might see a connection to performative reading in this behaviour. Young readers are commonly facing the accusation that, for them, calling reading their hobby, is actually “not so much about reading as it [is] about signaling that you [are] the type of person who would read”, as Anna Wiener half-jokingly notes when she describes users of an e-reading app in her memoir Uncanny Valley.
Is cosmopolitanism as a trend making a comeback? Is buying and posting about consuming international literature on social media what matters most to those 25 to 34-year-old readers? Or do younger generations simply feel more at home and connected to the increasing globalisation of our modern world, yearning to expand their horizons and experience the places they see online but cannot visit themselves? After all, travelling can be anything but cheap – especially to faraway countries like Japan.
A case for reading in translation
I cannot tell you the definitive answer to these questions – and I doubt there is a straightforward one, anyway. But even if there is a performative aspect to some of the increased interest in translated fiction, and even if translations are highly curated, their ‘potential to leave us with a deeper understanding of each other in this globalised world cannot be overstated.
The value of reading fiction from all over the world lies not in highlighting how different our contemporaries in other countries are or how famous authors of the past have fared elsewhere. Of course, being made to consider non-English, non-Western perspectives on various issues is of immense importance. But at the same time, international narratives can succeed in showing us how similar we actually are, and how, while the circumstances evoking them and the styles in which they are evoked may be different, just like the literary styles in which authors express them, the emotions they bring forth are something that unites us. Some translations may be better than others; some may have to make significant changes to their material in order to evoke these same emotions – but if there is one thing reading translated fiction has taught me, it is this.
Despite the reservations some may hold, reading international fiction, even historical international fiction, does not have to be a strenuous educational activity: the existence of phenomenal translators and an ever-increasing awareness of the importance of considering languages’ nuances in translation allow us to indulge in all of this, even without knowledge of another language. At times, we may not even realise that we are reading a text that was initially produced in a different language. Especially as English speakers, we should consider ourselves lucky to have access to so many translations to explore at our leisure.
And with this many books to choose from, why not simply read what intrigues – regardless of which language it was first written in and regardless of where its author comes from? Why distinguish based on an author’s heritage, especially when the distinction places English-speaking countries on one side and the whole non-English-speaking world on the other?
Art first, cultural representation second
After all, literature is not an unmediated expression of one’s culture in the first place and should not be understood as such. For this reason, reading an Italian novel as a novel that happens to be written in Italy and might contain specifically Italian elements, and appreciating these elements if they are indeed prominent, might be more rewarding than reading it as simply an “Italian novel.” As authors like Haruki Murakami, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o or Yōko Tawada show, many contemporary works can no longer be considered a product of just one language or culture anyway – and neither can most of us: at the University of Oxford, 46% of all students are international students who learn, research and write in English but call one (or more) of over 160 different countries their home.
Those who do feel uneasy at the thought of missing out on the “essence” of a work when reading in translation will surely appreciate the recent trend in publishing and academia to make translators more visible, which has led to translation as a practice being both scrutinised and celebrated – as evidenced by the media response to the controversial English translation of Han Kang’s The Vegetarian by Deborah Smith. And if that worry remains, reading translations with footnotes, translator’s notes or interviews with translators can enrich and add a new layer of meaning to the reading experience – not to mention the many instances in which texts do not lose but gain significance in translation.
In this manner, reading international fiction can be enriching in more ways than one. It can be educational, but, most of all, it allows us to see life through the eyes of someone else, elsewhere, bringing attention to nuances of the human experience that we perhaps would never have thought to be so universal.