It’s not Random House, and it’s not a specialized indie outfit like Europa Editions or New Directions. It’s Amazon.com. Last year, the company’s translation imprint, AmazonCrossing, brought out 44 new English translations from a diverse slate of literature, including Icelandic, Turkish and Korean. That’s more translated titles than any other American publisher, according to data from Three Percent, a literary translation blog at the University of Rochester.

This year, AmazonCrossing says it expects to increase its output, projecting 70 new translations into English and 200 into German. The company has also added a dozen or so translations into a new target language: French.

Those numbers might not seem huge until you consider how statistically marginal literary translation is to the publishing business, at least in the United States. Last year, fewer than 600 books of translated fiction and poetry were published there, which was actually a marked increase from 2009, when only 340 translations were published in total. More.

See: The New York Times

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