«Recent developments in technology and the book publishing industry that explain how the market sustains the high production of retranslations»

Mary Wardle
«Eeny, Meeny, Miny, Moe: The Reception of Retranslations and how readers choose»
Cadernos de Tradução, vol. 39, n.º 1 (2019)
Número temático: «Retranslation in Context», coord. por Guillermo Sanz Gallego y Piet Van Pouke.

Cadernos de Tradução | Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina | Centro de Comunicação e Expressão- CCE | Pós-Graduação em Estudos da Tradução | Florianópolis | Santa Catarina | BRASIL

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«Abstract

»One of the paradoxes of the digital age is that it has fostered small, independent enterprises alongside corporate multinationals, a trend reflected in publishing where international players co-exist on the web alongside small, independent publishers often keen to commission retranslations as ‘safe bets’.

»Due to customers’ ease of access over the Internet and sellers’ low costs, book sales increasingly correspond to the ‘long tail’ statistical model whereby high numbers of relatively few bestsellers are sold, with the graph ‘tailing off’ sharply to a high number of items selling few copies.

»Many retranslations are often available simultaneously and, as sales are spread among them, will tend to be distributed along this tail. As online book sales increase, whether as hard copies or in digital format, when it comes to buying a translated text, customers often find themselves confronted with a choice between several different editions.

»This paper investigates some of the influences affecting choice, using Italian retranslations of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and English retranslations of Machiavelli’s The Prince as examples. Reference will be made to the shift from professional review writing to online customer appraisals and star-ratings, the presence of retranslations on bestseller lists as well as to the importance of paratextual elements such as book covers.

»The long tail

»This section of the paper will trace recent developments in technology and the book publishing industry in an attempt to explain how the market has adjusted to sustain such a high production of retranslations. As early as 1994, Jeff Bezos, who was to become the founder of Amazon, had an intuition that would revolutionise the book industry: he saw that what was in effect already a mature market could still represent a strong opportunity for improvement and growth and that this could be brought about by the then fledgling Internet. With more than 100,000 new titles published every year in the US alone and, at the time, more than 1.5 million Englishlanguage books in print, even the largest superstores could not hope to stock more than a tiny fraction of all the available titles (Anderson 49).

»Bezos’ insight was to foresee how the Internet offered a way to break down most of the physical barriers to unlimited selection. The bricks-and-mortar superstores—such as Borders, and Barnes and Noble—that had recently sprung up had scale. They were, however, also weighed down by the economics of having to provide shelves, manage staff, run locations, and deal with a variety of factors from weather to working hours. Since then, over the last twenty years, book trading occurs increasingly online, without the constraints of physical shops and bookstore overheads.

»The unlimited shelf-space of web retail, therefore, has allowed smaller publishing companies to be financially viable, concentrating more on the business of producing books, and less on their distribution and relationship with the booksellers. In the same way, more narrowly targeted goods and services have begun to be as economically attractive as mainstream fare (Anderson 52).

»As with many other products, niche interests can be catered for because the marketplace has become as extensive as the Internet. One of the paradoxes of the digital age, therefore, is that, rather than homogenizing the offer, in many ways, it has contributed to fostering small, independent enterprises alongside the corporate multinationals. This is reflected in the publishing industry where large international players such as Pearson, Random House and HarperCollins co-exist on the web alongside small, national, independent book publishers with limited catalogues and even more limited financial resources.

»The change has been profound and has occurred in a short space of time. In 1994, the year of Bezos’ brainwave, over seventy percent of total fiction sales in the US were accounted for by only five authors: John Grisham, Tom Clancy, Danielle Steel, Michael Crichton and Stephen King (Sorensen 721). The table below, illustrating the collective unit sales of all the number one bestsellers over the year, highlights the dramatic loosening of the stranglehold of the bestseller over US book sales.

»The paperback figures, for example, show how the various individual chart toppers over the course of 1994 made up over 43 million sales, whereas, by 2011, that number was reduced to almost a third.

»The change occurs gradually but consistently over the seventeen-year period. The figures, however, do not represent a relentless loss of readers: overall book sales in the US remain more or less constant over the same timescale. The conclusion, therefore, has to be that sales are distributed over a larger number of books.

»The Pareto Principle, as applied to retail, suggests that 20% of a given company’s products accounts for 80% of their sales and that this is applicable, by and large, across all product categories (Anderson 126). Book sales up until the mid-to-late nineties certainly fit into this pattern (Greco et al 171-2). With the move to online and digital-content businesses, however, this percentage has begun to shift radically, with demand, not only for the most popular items, but now also for products beyond the 'greatest hits'-and the list is seemingly limitless. In the case of music, figures for iTunes show that "the aggregate market for niche or 'subculture' music is effectively unbounded" and accounts for a staggering 98% of revenue (Anderson 7-8).

»The resulting statistical model is what Chris Anderson has termed 'a long tail' curve where very high numbers of relatively few best-sellers are sold (usually over a short period of time, immediately after they appear on the market). The graph 'tails off' sharply then because a very high number of items sell very few copies (over a longer time span).

»What is interesting, from a sales point of view, is that the items distributed along the long tail, collectively, make up a market share that rivals or exceeds the relatively low number of current bestsellers and blockbusters. Sorne of the retranslations discussed above will now be out of print and only available for consultation in private collections and libraries, but simultaneously many of them are available for sale: as a result, readers have to choose and subsequent sales are divided among the various retranslations. The lower the number of copies sold for each retranslation, the further its position along the ‘tail’.

»A traditional bricks-and-mortar bookshop will usually stock one, perhaps two, different retranslations and most readers simply buy what they find, probably not even aware that the translation they are buying is one of several options, but an online search (Amazon being typically the first port-of-call) reveals a more diverse offer. Apart from the long-out-of-print original 1936 Italian Gatsby translation, all the other fourteen versions are in fact available for sale online. Of the sixty or so Alice translations to date, a search on Amazon Italia produces twenty-six retranslations available for sale today.

»As regards The Prince in English, for obvious reasons, the earlier printed retranslations are more difficult to track down (this topic will be discussed later), but most post-1900 retranslations are still available: from a total of thirty-five English retranslations, at least twenty appear simultaneously for sale online (Wardle 287).

»So how do readers / consumers choose?

»According to Barry Schwartz’s ‘Paradox of Choice’, while life without choice is almost unbearable, variety can introduce “autonomy, control and liberation” (2). He adds that when presented with an extensive array of options, the potential customers’ interest is initially aroused, but, ultimately, they seem to be overwhelmed. Factors such as hesitation take over and buyer’s remorse can creep in:

»“...as the number of choices keeps growing, negative aspects of having a multitude of options begin to appear. As the number of choices grows further, the negatives escalate until we become overloaded. At this point, choice no longer liberates, but debilitates. It might even be said to tyrannize” (2).

»Research also indicates that, in the online context, when confronted with vast choice of any kind, consumers exhibit consistent behavior and look beyond the items on the first page and begin investigating all products displayed—even those that do not necessarily correspond to the initial search criteria—navigating away from mainstream markets (Anderson 8).

»At the click of a mouse, Amazon, for example, allows customers access to thousands of third-party bookstores selling niche editions or second-hand out-ofprint books including many of the retranslations mentioned above.

»While it might seem counterintuitive to offer ‘shelf space’ to the products of other sellers, Amazon are interested in being the chief point of reference, acting as intermediaries for other retailers and so becoming the all-containing go-to website. For the customer, there is one way in which choice can be managed: rather than all the items for sale appearing as one long indiscriminate list to scroll through, the consumer is presented with options which have been somehow ordered and ranked.

»While the potential customer still feels they are making individual decisions, their choices are in fact the object of influence. One, more traditional, example of this is the hit parade, chart or bestseller list model.

»Book covers

»Any information on the front cover of a book, therefore, is highly influential, even in the online environment. The salient feature is, of course, the illustration. Although his comments refer to the role played by illustrations in literature for children, Cay Dollerup’s general point is still valid when he writes:

»“[I]llustrations influence responses [and] become part of some kind of ‘ideal tales’ released in readings and they contribute substantially to narrative contracts today. . . . The draughtsmen become the equals of the translators. They take over part of the narrative contract and become co-narrators” (258-9).

»In the case of retranslations, it is not uncommon to find earlier outof- copyright translations appearing with contemporary artwork on the cover and recent publication dates, giving the impression of a new translation. This is particularly common with the digital texts available online to download free of charge or at low prices and lowcost printed hard copies: of the English retranslations of The Prince available through Amazon UK, it is the two 1882 retranslations by Christian Detmold or Ninian Hill Thomson and, in particular, W.K. Marriott’s 1908 version that appear most frequently (but all with post-2010 publishing dates), rather than any of the twentysix subsequent alternatives.

»Each publishing company, wanting to publish their own ‘new’ edition of The Prince, produces their own paratextual elements—cover illustration, introduction or biographical information on the author—while the translation reproduced is one of the three listed above. On the US site, these revamped translations are even flagged explicitly as the ‘bestsellers’. There is also an established tradition of republishing previous (re)translations with stills from new audiovisual adaptations of the work, making them seem new retranslations: when Baz Luhrmann’s film of The Great Gatsby was released in 2013, in Italy it was Fernanda Pivano’s 1950 retranslation, and not one of the many more recent versions that appeared with images of Leonardo DiCaprio on the cover.

»Further examples include the 2015 English edition of War and Peace, published by BBC Books to coincide with their 2016 television adaptation. While the front cover bears images from the series and boasts “with an introduction by Andrew Davies”, author of the screenplay, the translation is, in fact, that of Aylmer and Louise Maude from 1922.

»Again, the cover somehow creates the illusion of a new, current retranslation. Another ‘ploy’ often adopted by publishing companies to help their latest retranslation emerge among other earlier versions is to add phrases such as ‘now in a new translation’ on the front cover: Penguin printed the caption “a gripping modern translation by Tim Parks” on the cover of their 2009 edition of The Prince, sidestepping the fact that there had been no fewer than six other English translations in the previous nine years alone.

»Most translated books make no reference on their covers to the fact that the text was originally in a different language (unless the translator is famous in their own right), adding to the impact, therefore, when publishers do decide to highlight the retranslation, as in the case above. Marketing a retranslation as ‘new’ plays on the association whereby “new equals better, improved”: the potential buyer/reader is led to infer that if this is a new translation there was possibly something lacking in the previous version(s).

»It somehow diminishes earlier translations. The same message can be conveyed, sometimes more subtly, in the preface, introduction or translator’s note inside the volume, although few potential customers will go as far as reading this part of the book’s apparatus before operating their choice. The perceived appeal of newness is so strong that, at times, publishers appear ‘guilty’ of giving the impression of novelty, even when marketing existing translations: ‘celebrity’ endorsements can be deployed on book covers to appeal to specific audiences and are sometimes used to introduce a new demographic to an otherwise little-known text.

»A recent English-language edition of Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style, published in 2013, besides mentioning a foreword by Umberto Eco and an essay by Italo Calvino on the cover, highlights a quote from Philip Pullman, a far more familiar name than Queneau himself, Eco or Calvino to a younger Englishspeaking audience: “I’ve loved Exercises in Style for years. This translation is impeccable, extraordinary”. The translation is the only published English translation, that of 1958 by Barbara Wright, but the use of the demonstrative adjective seems to suggest that other translations exist and that this one is better.

»Conclusion

»Having established that retranslations of the same source text are not necessarily separated by long periods of time, it is apparent that different publishing companies may produce and market their respective volumes contemporaneously. The ‘long tail’ statistical model reflected by today’s book publishing industry, with specific relevance to its online presence, means that individual customers can potentially source numerous retranslations and are therefore required to make a choice.

»Evidence would suggest that, although some readers will seek out specific retranslations for reasons inherently linked to what they perceive as the quality of the translation, most are influenced by combinations of ‘external’ factors such as availability, marketing strategies, price, prominence and distribution network of the publishing companies, star-ratings and levels of appreciation registered by fellow consumers.

»Although more extensive research needs to be carried out to further identify and quantify the many elements affecting this consumer choice and reader behavior, the present paper hopes to contribute an insight into the commercialization of retranslations, especially in the online environment, and provide some information regarding the factors that affect their reception».