For centuries, the art of translation has helped people to created cultural, business and personal relationships. Here are some of the most interesting statistics in this area.
- For centuries, the art of translation has helped people to created cultural, business and personal relationships. Here are some of the most interesting statistics in this area:
- The author of the most translated books is Agatha Christie (7233 translations). Second place belongs to Jules Verne (4751 translations) and third is William Shakespeare (4293 translations).
- There are more than 300,000 professional translators/interpreters in the world which amounts to about 0,004% of the world’s population. According to research, the volume of translation/interpretation services market is around $50 million and this amount increases every year.
- The most translated book across the globe is The Bible. Books of the Old and the New Testament can be read in more than 550 languages (some books of The Bible have been translated into 2932 languages). You can read The United Nations Universal Declaration on Human Rights in 462 languages. Did you know that the numbers of translations of “Harry Potter” novels are being read in 70 languages, but trail the number of translations of ”The Little Prince”, published in 300 languages (probably because that bestseller of Saint-Exupery was written many years earlier).
- The five most popular target languages of these books are: English, German, French, Spanish and Japanese. And the top original languages to be translated from are: English, French, German, Italian and Russian.
- There are 7000 living languages in the world. Five of them are spoken just by one person in the world: Cristina Calderon speaks Yagan, Charlie Mungulda is a native speaker of the Amurdak language, Doris Jin Lamar McLemore speaks Wichita, Verdena Parker is the last fluent speaker of the Hupa language, and John Steckley speaks Wyandot.
