I’ve been playing around with the Index Translationum, a United Nations database of translated works, comparing the number of works translated to English with the number translated from English. I wasn’t surprised that the ratio is pretty lopsided; the exact ratio depends on which period you search over, of course, but a quick and dirty estimate is that 75 times as many books are translated into Hungarian as from it. If you restrict yourself to books classified as “Literature”, which is the category of books I’m most interested, the ratio goes up to about a hundred to one.

A scattershot sampling of other languages turned up ratios from 7 to 1 (for Romanian and Turkish) to 200 to 1 (Latvian). (Russian was an outlier, with supposedly twice as many books translated into English as the other way around, but I strongly suspect bad data.)

I also looked at how many works of literature were translated from various languages per year per million native speakers. Hungary managed about 0.6, the same as Japanese. French had 4.7, German 1.9, Swedish 3.4, Romanian 0.9, Turkish 0.1. Estonian was the champion among the languages I looked at; 69 translations over ten years, only 1.1 million native speakers, for a ratio of about 6.3.

Naturally, I’ll do my best to fight this injustice. These freeloading countries won’t get away with it any longer than I can help, taking our books without giving us a fair return.