The missing catalogue: why finding books in translation is still so hard

Author here. The piece is about bibliographic infrastructure, but the finding that surprised me most while building the dataset was language-specific: Catalan/Valencian (~10M speakers) jumped from near-invisibility in commercial aggregators to 8th place globally once nine national library catalogues were cross-referenced. Bengali, Thai and Urdu —all with substantial publishing industries— remained near the bottom, not because translations don't exist but because the institutions documenting them haven't been connected yet. The 97% figure (editions appearing in only one of 14 sources) held across every sample I could run. Happy to answer questions about methodology, source coverage, or why ISBN metadata is such a mess.

I deal with similar issues. Translation is sometimes thought of as a mechanical process, but it is a creative process where the translator’s approach varies from subtle to heavy-handed. At some point the translation can be thought of as a new creative work, and that line is hard to define.

One of my parents was a translator who worked directly with authors, and in the review process the author would expand or refine the text in ways that were not present in the original. At that point, which work is the true representation of the authors intent, the fixed original or the updated translation?

It's so interesting to think about how there's fewer 'Le Petit Prince' versions in French (which there seems to be only one) vs in Chinese, where there seem to be at least 50 versions. [0]

You could argue that there's more experimentation and creation in other languages than the original just because it's socially acceptable to do 'yet another translation', but not a newer version in the same language (unless it's a manual or technical material).

[0] https://www.cjvlang.com/petitprince

Proper ISBN id is a lot of unpaid expensive work. If you run small print, you may have sent like 10% of all your prints to libraries at your own expense. Putting unregisted pdf on web is for free...