Why Are So Few Books Ever Translated?

By WonderBooks · Oct 15, 2026

About three percent of books published in the United States are translations. The reasons are rights, cost and a bet on strangers, and one of them has just changed.

Because translation has always been a bet placed after the fact. A book earns its translation by selling first in its own language, then a foreign publisher buys the rights, pays a translator by the word, and gambles that readers in another country will want it. Each step costs money and takes years, and most books never clear the first one.

The three percent problem.

For years the Three Percent project at the University of Rochester has tracked the share of books published in the United States that are translations, and it has stayed near three percent; for fiction and poetry it is nearer one. English is the most translated-from language in the world by a wide margin and one of the least translated into, by UNESCO's Index Translationum. The traffic runs one way: a novel written in English travels everywhere, and a novel written in Arabic or Korean usually reaches a reader in Brazil, if it ever does, by way of an English edition first.

The consequence falls on readers rather than publishers. UNESCO has estimated that around forty percent of the world's population does not have access to education in a language they speak or understand. For books the figure is impossible to state, but anyone who has looked for an illustrated book about the solar system in Hindi, or a retelling of a Russian novel in Arabic, knows the shape of the shelf: thin, late and mostly translated from English.

Three costs, and only one of them is the translator.

• Rights: a foreign edition has to be licensed, negotiated and paid for before a word is translated.
• The translator: paid per word, and a book is a lot of words.
• The bet: printing and marketing in a market the publisher does not know, for readers it cannot see.
• Time: the three steps run in sequence, so a translation typically appears years after the original.

Illustrated books are the worst case. Their words are few, so the translation itself is cheap, but their pictures are expensive and fixed, the text has to fit the same page, and a right-to-left language such as Arabic changes how every page reads. So the books that would travel most easily across languages, the ones a child or a learner can finish, are the ones that travel least.

What machine translation does and does not change.

The 2024 Society of Authors survey in the UK found more than a third of translators who responded had already lost work to generative AI, a higher share than illustrators reported. That is a real cost to a real trade, and it is not the end of the story. Machine translation is uneven: strong between large languages with vast digital text, weak for languages with little of it, and prone to flattening idiom, rhythm and register in exactly the way a story cannot survive. What has changed is the first draft. The judgment, reading the result in the target language and deciding whether it is a book, is still the job, and the translation bodies now distinguish it by name as post-editing.

One library launched in thirteen languages at once.

WonderBooks publishes every book in thirteen languages at the same time, rather than translating the ones that sell. Its twelve libraries hold 2,341 illustrated books and 29,179 painted pages, and a reader opening the history shelf in Arabic, Russian, Hindi or Korean sees the same shelf as a reader in English. Each translation is judged in its own language before release, and Arabic is treated as the hardest case and checked first: right-to-left text, taller letterforms that crop a line sized for Latin script, and digits that still run left to right inside a right-to-left sentence.

The founder is Egyptian, and Arabic is one of the library's founding languages rather than a market it expanded into. He hired human translators for the first version in 2016, and his view of what a reader is owed has not changed with the method.

The best quality is the important thing, before the price. They deserve that.

The rule that nothing ships in English only.

The same rule reaches the furniture. A new button, a new shelf, a new label in the apps does not ship until it exists in all thirteen languages, because one untranslated word in a reader's own language is the most visible mistake a library can make. A string that is right in Arabic has usually been right everywhere, which is why Arabic is where a new screen is checked first. Translation at this scale was never going to be bought a word at a time. It was going to happen for every book or for none of them.