Catalan Books Nowadays Catalan, the tenth most translated language in the world
Catalan is the tenth language worldwide in terms of the number of translations, as reported by UNESCO in its latest World Culture Report (1999). According to the table "Translations by original language", Catalan comes tenth after languages such as English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Russian and Swedish, and is very close to languages in countries with a similar demography and economic development, such as Danish and Czech. It comes ahead of 80 other languages, including, for example, Norwegian, Arabic, Japanese, Portuguese, Chinese, Polish and Finnish. Furthermore, if we consider the relationship between translations and the number of speakers, on an international scale, Catalan is the fifth most translated language, with 56.2 translations per 1 million speakers, behind Swedish, English, French and Danish.
This underlines Catalan's importance as a language of culture and its prestige. Despite all the historical and political adversities (the Civil War, the Franco dictatorship, etc.) the Catalan language and Catalan literature have have faced, they experienced a spectacular revival in the 20th century, reaching a standing that has not been seen since the 13th, 14th and 15th centuries. Thus, frome the Medieval writers, such as Ramon Llull, Ausiàs March and Joanot Martorell, through to modern authors including Mercè Rodoreda, Josep Pla, Llorenç Villalonga, Joan Fuster, Pere Calders, Joan Brossa and others, Catalan has become one of the Romance languages with an outstanding cultural and literary heritage, in terms of both quantity and quality.
Publishing output in catalan continues to rise
In 1982, the publishing industry in Catalan issued 2,175 different titles. In 1999, ths figure rose to almost 7,900 for a potential market of around 10 million readers. This spectacular rise is fue to various factors, such as the re-introduction, folowing the restoration of democracy, of Catalan into education and the media, the implementation of polices by the Generalitat de Catalunya (the Government of Catalonia) to support publisching in Catalan, and the healthy, land now charecteristic, dynamism of the Catalan publishing industry.
It is this dynamism that is responsible for the fact that 67,8% of the entire publishing output of Spain, both in Catalan and in Spanish, is to be found concentrated in Catalonia, especially in Barcelona, accounting for 60% of the approximate total domestic trade turnover of 400 billion pesetas.
This makes the publishing industry the leading cultural sector in Catalonia and the most representative and firmly established. This solidity is the best guarentee there is for promoting books as an essential cultural asset and as an irreplaceable means for spreanding knowledge.
Catalan Translations of World Literature
Translation into Catalan of books written in other languages is outstanding. Of the 7,800 titles published in Catalan each year, around 20 % are translations from other languages, mostly from English, Spanish and French but also from Arabic, Chinese, Russian, Czech, Slovak, Norwegian or indeed in any other language. This makes Catalan culture an open culture, one that is in harmony with rhythms of the transmission of knowledge and information in the world today.
Font: Departament de Cultura Generalitat de Catalunya Frankfurt 2000
