This recent visualization/data/research/paper has been making the rounds on social media: http://language.media.mit.edu/visualizations/books (see discussion over at Science Blog). It does graph analytics on global published book translation, multilingual Wikipedia editors, and multilingual tweeters. I was most interested in the more formal world of published books, and was sad that their nice data visualization didn't show me the numbers associated with each edge (connection in the graph), so pulled out the raw data for Japanese, and sorted them by the number of book translations: https://gist.github.com/fasiha/1d2e470fb21fe65cc453

I was surprised and saddened that Chinese readers got nearly triple (and French readers double) the number of translations from Japanese as English readers did. Queue lamentations about lack of interest in foreign language literature on the part of the Anglophone reading public (or publishing industry).

The data regarding bilingual Wikipedians and Twitterians (Twits?) is very different and very interesting as well.

Your gleanings from these datasets?

Here's the full list of Japanese to/from book translations for easy consumption (data separated by to/from is in the gist linked above):

English -> Japanese: 100739
French -> Japanese: 9893
German -> Japanese: 8817
Japanese -> French: 8576
Japanese -> Chinese: 7196
Japanese -> English: 3476
Japanese -> German: 2090
Russian -> Japanese: 1981
Chinese -> Japanese: 1830
Italian -> Japanese: 1517
Korean -> Japanese: 1243
Japanese -> Spanish: 1195
Spanish -> Japanese: 1019
Swedish -> Japanese: 602
Japanese -> Swedish: 583
Japanese -> Danish: 560
Japanese -> Russian: 507
Dutch -> Japanese: 428
Japanese -> Dutch: 334
Japanese -> Italian: 308
Latin -> Japanese: 305
Japanese -> Finnish: 273
Danish -> Japanese: 269
Japanese -> Norwegian: 260
Ancient Greek (to 1453) -> Japanese: 230
Portuguese -> Japanese: 216
Czech -> Japanese: 188
Polish -> Japanese: 145
Norwegian -> Japanese: 135
Japanese -> Hungarian: 129
Japanese -> Serbo-Croatian: 129
Finnish -> Japanese: 119
Japanese -> Czech: 116
Arabic -> Japanese: 106
Hebrew -> Japanese: 101
Japanese -> Portuguese: 98
Hungarian -> Japanese: 98
Japanese -> Bulgarian: 97
Japanese -> Polish: 89
Japanese -> Romanian: 87
Thai -> Japanese: 80
Malay (macrolanguage) -> Japanese: 77
Japanese -> Modern Greek (1453-): 75
Japanese -> Lithuanian: 71
Japanese -> Korean: 65
Sanskrit -> Japanese: 59
Japanese -> Catalan: 57
Serbo-Croatian -> Japanese: 47
Pali -> Japanese: 42
Vietnamese -> Japanese: 40
Persian -> Japanese: 39
Tibetan -> Japanese: 39
Japanese -> Slovenian: 34
Japanese -> Thai: 33
Japanese -> Arabic: 32
Hindi -> Japanese: 32
Bengali -> Japanese: 32
Japanese -> Turkish: 31
Japanese -> Malay (macrolanguage): 31
Japanese -> Persian: 31
Catalan -> Japanese: 29
Japanese -> Hebrew: 28
Modern Greek (1453-) -> Japanese: 28
Bulgarian -> Japanese: 28
Romanian -> Japanese: 27
Burmese -> Japanese: 27
Japanese -> Mongolian: 27
Japanese -> Albanian: 25
Japanese -> Estonian: 25
Turkish -> Japanese: 23
Japanese -> Slovak: 21
Japanese -> Nepali macrolanguage: 20
Mongolian -> Japanese: 19
Japanese -> Latvian: 18
Urdu -> Japanese: 17
Japanese -> Sinhala: 16
Japanese -> Macedonian: 15
Estonian -> Japanese: 15
Ukrainian -> Japanese: 14
Japanese -> Newari: 14
Japanese -> Ukrainian: 13
Japanese -> Moldavian: 13
Japanese -> Georgian: 13
Japanese -> Vietnamese: 12
Yiddish -> Japanese: 11
Japanese -> Hindi: 11
Old French (842-ca. 1400) -> Japanese: 11
Icelandic -> Japanese: 10
Japanese -> Malayalam: 9
Japanese -> Bengali: 9
Tamil -> Japanese: 8
Malayalam -> Japanese: 8
Central Khmer -> Japanese: 8
Middle High German (ca. 1050-1500) -> Japanese: 8
Filipino (macrolanguage) -> Japanese: 8
Esperanto -> Japanese: 8
Slovenian -> Japanese: 7
Nepali macrolanguage -> Japanese: 7
Japanese -> Uzbek: 7
Japanese -> Icelandic: 7
Slovak -> Japanese: 6
Lithuanian -> Japanese: 6
Lao -> Japanese: 6
Japanese -> Urdu: 6
Albanian -> Japanese: 5
Sinhala -> Japanese: 5
Marathi -> Japanese: 5
Japanese -> Uighur: 5
Japanese -> Galician: 5
Japanese -> Esperanto: 5
Gujarati -> Japanese: 5
Syriac -> Japanese: 4
Swahili (macrolanguage) -> Japanese: 4
Japanese -> Kazakh: 4
Latvian -> Japanese: 3
Kirghiz -> Japanese: 3
Japanese -> Telugu: 3
Basque -> Japanese: 3
Middle English (1100-1500) -> Japanese: 3
Belarusian -> Japanese: 3
Old English (ca. 450-1100) -> Japanese: 3
Zulu -> Japanese: 2
Telugu -> Japanese: 2
Sumerian -> Japanese: 2
Old Provení_al (to 1500) -> Japanese: 2
Neapolitan -> Japanese: 2
Moldavian -> Japanese: 2
Lahu -> Japanese: 2
Georgian -> Japanese: 2
Kannada -> Japanese: 2
Japanese -> Tamil: 2
Japanese -> Oriya (macrolanguage): 2
Japanese -> Armenian: 2
Japanese -> Basque: 2
Japanese -> Breton: 2
Japanese -> Belarusian: 2
Japanese -> Azerbaijani: 2
Galician -> Japanese: 2
Middle French (ca. 1400-1600) -> Japanese: 2
Egyptian (Ancient) -> Japanese: 2
Pushto -> Japanese: 1
Pahlavi -> Japanese: 1
Old Spanish -> Japanese: 1
Nyanga -> Japanese: 1
Old Norse -> Japanese: 1
Gilyak -> Japanese: 1
Macedonian -> Japanese: 1
Japanese -> Turkmen: 1
Japanese -> Tajik: 1
Japanese -> Sanskrit: 1
Japanese -> Burmese: 1
Japanese -> Marathi: 1
Japanese ->: 1
Japanese -> Kirghiz: 1
Japanese -> Kalaallisut: 1
Japanese -> Inuktitut: 1
Japanese -> Gujarati: 1
Japanese -> Faroese: 1
Japanese -> Asturian: 1
Japanese -> Assamese: 1
Javanese -> Japanese: 1
Old High German (ca. 750-1050) -> Japanese: 1
Irish -> Japanese: 1
Middle Dutch (ca. 1050-1350) -> Japanese: 1
Welsh -> Japanese: 1
Azerbaijani -> Japanese: 1
Southern Altai -> Japanese: 1
Akkadian -> Japanese: 1
Acoli -> Japanese: 1

China beating anything out isn't surprising when you consider how many Chinese speaker there are. Kind of surprised about the French thing though, but I wonder if there isn't some connection with the famous interpreting school in France.

Very interesting post!
I knew French would be high up there. When I still relied on English translations of J-lit, a large number of the interesting-seeming books I wanted to read weren't available in English, but most had been translated to French. If I'm not mistaken, I think France has the only Kinokuniya store in Europe. Maybe Japonisme never really died there...

i would always tell to people who read a lot of translated japanese books/manga to learn french, not english. french not only translate more, but they also translate a much wider variety of stuff. they seem to care a lot for niche markets too, while english translations are more focused on what's currently popular. so, for example, the only available translation of a cult novel 'yapoo' is in french, of course. there are many more examples like this.

Ah, c'est très intéressant, merci pour ça. J'aime bien la française! After English, French seems to have the highest eigenvector centrality, so it may be not just japonisme but touts-les-ismes. Really wish the data visualization broke down edges between to/from and per language... apparently D3Plus can't yet support that >.>

vix86 Wrote:China beating anything out isn't surprising when you consider how many Chinese speaker there are.

I don't think this is quite it. Looking at the Chinese node at http://language.media.mit.edu/visualizations/books you can see that translations to/from Chinese are currently dwarfed by other edges. Even the Dutch<->English line seems thicker than Chinese<->English, though no doubt that'll change as per capita GDP there continues to rise.

I didn't know that French had so many translations! If I knew that I probably would have started reading in French I long time ago.

About French graded readers, I have a collection with 50 adapted books and audio books. They are excellent and were carefully designed to teach a lot o vocabulary. Unfortunately, I couldn't find that many Japanese graded readers...

aldebrn Wrote:highest eigenvector centrality.

French and Portuguese have a very interesting word: obscurantisme. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obscurantism

Also, there is a extremely interesting French book related to this. It is called "Impostures Intellectuelles": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fashionable_Nonsense